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

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sat, 17 Nov 2012, Jim Klimov wrote:
>
>> 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?

If the drive stalls indefinitely trying to recover a bad sector, then 
there is a big problem.

The uncorrectable bit error rate is an important factor when 
considering what level of RAID is necessary for the size of disk used.

While whole drives can always fail, the uncorrectable bit error rate 
has quite a lot do do with the incidence of additional errors when 
recovering from a failed drive.  If the drive is now 10X larger, then 
it is useful if the error rate is 10X smaller so that the sector 
failure per drive is still similar.

While I have had several whole drives fail here, I have yet to 
encounter an unrecoverable media error.  Maybe I am just lucky, but I 
do try to avoid garden variety drives and spend extra for "enterprise" 
type drives whenever I have the option.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/