[OpenIndiana-discuss] hardware specs for illumos storage/virtualization server

[Jim Klimov]

On 2012-11-17 18:41, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
 > Hard drive prices from big-name system vendors are often "ridiculous"

I think we were talking about the open market, shelf prices.
Really, I cannot point at a shop today to prove the statement,
but I was skimming the prices this summer and saw several OEMs
(I think Hitachi *Star and Seagate Constellation) in several
variants of 2-3Tb models whose prices were way apart at the
same disk size.

> Before claiming "ridiculous pricing", it is useful to examine the
> specification sheet.  There may be a 10X difference in the uncorrected
> media error rate, or error rate may not be specified at all.

Valid point... but how much does it matter if we throw ZFS at these
drives and expect it to save the day against the BER and similar
failures?

My box did have uncorrected raidz2 errors and couldn't even point
to a failed drive - it's as if they all scratched the same region
at once... which may have been caused by power jerks or something,
with all drives accessing same areas in unison. So I'm not a good
authority to preach about how ZFS really will always save the day :)
But it certainly did detect the failure and allowed me to timely
replace those files which were available elsewhere. No such luck
for the more unique files...

//Jim