On 08/27/2014 01:03 PM, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > Paul de Weerd: > >> | Here's a bold suggestion: Don't buy consumer drives. >> >> The guys that buy LOTS disagree. >> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/ > Oh, I know. That's a different operations model, though. When you > have LOTS of drives, failures will inevitably become commonplace, > so your whole storage architecture will be built to deal transparently > with lost drives, and once that is in place, a higher rate of failure > may be an acceptable trade-off. > > This is very different from an environment with few drives, where > any single failure will be a pain to deal with. The saying goes > that nobody wants backup, everybody wants restore, but I'd really > prefer not having to restore either. > > Now, the real question is whether enterprise drives actually *are* > more reliable than consumer drives. > This paper: http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/enterprise_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_.pdf describes the different features and intended uses of enterprise drives vs. desktop drives. The hardware requirements for a (good) enterprise drive far exceed those of a desktop drive. Software has to use those features as well.
Most important to users: different error recovery philosophy! Desktop: do whatever is necessary to correct a read error, no matter how long it takes. The software is not time sensitive and may not be able to recover from a single sector error. Enterprise: disk must stay on line. Perform simple error recovery and depend on higher level software to repair or replace the bad sector. So unless an enterprise drive is in aRAID system with intelligent sector recovery including bad block remapping, the much higher price may not buy better usability. As usual YMMV.
