[GRLUG] Enterprise hard drives

[Tim Schmidt]

On 4/4/07, David Pembrook <david at pembrook.net> wrote:
> Take a look at them... With the exception of the WD Raptor's (pricey)
> they have good warranties and a good price/performance ratio. Its not an
> article on SCSI but rather ATA and SATA drives.
>
> I'd still go with the (real) hardware solution anyhow if doing more than
> mirroring.

Ummm...  yeah.

Warranty seems like an alright reason, but drive size keeps up with
moore's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk#Capacity), so by
the time you're feeling the difference between a 3 and a 5 year
warranty, you're drive is (approx):

3 years: 1/3
4 years: 1/4
5 years: 2/11

the size of what's available for your original buying cost, new.  If
your original buying cost is low - buying a commodity drive - you can
increase your aggregate capacity by a factor of 3, every 3 years, for
two or three cycles, ending up with a much larger capacity _and_
longer warranty period (your drives are never out of warranty) than
buying enterprise drives.

As far as "real hardware" raid goes...

http://linux.yyz.us/why-software-raid.html

Which is not even getting into things like ZFS or other, newer,
software raid-like schemes.

Any other reasons?

--tim