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

[Paul B. Henson]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 03:13:03PM -0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:

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

Yep. That's why I definitely don't want to go with consumer grade
desktop drives. I think the WD Red is about the only "inexpensive" SATA
drive out now that supports low TLER, the evil manufacturers seem to
have wiped that tunable out of their consumer SATA firmware 8-/.

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

I'm going raidz2 and hoping for the best. Kinda sucks to blow so much on
parity, but better than losing everying. My current linux box uses
software raid, I lost a SATA controller last year that screwed up the
array to the point where I had to blow it away :(, I lost like two years
worth of recordings <sigh>.

> 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.

I would/do at work, but just don't have the budget for it at home :(.