"enterprise" drives

[Matt Galster]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 6:58 PM, Tom Metro <blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> John Abreau wrote:
>> I've lost enough data from drive failures to convince me it's worth
>> the extra money to get better drives. ... at the moment, a 1 TB
>> Barracuda NS series is $229, and a 1 TB Barracuda AS series is $139.
>
> For non-professional use, the drive that costs twice as much would need
> to be so reliable that you forgo the use of RAID, otherwise it wouldn't
> be worth paying twice as much. That assuming the cheaper drives aren't
> so unreliable that multiple failures in a short span of time are highly
> probable.
>
>  -Tom
>
> --
> Tom Metro


For server use where you need to RAID to provide availability, it has
been shown that there are frequent failures of additional drives
during the rebuild or while waiting for drive replacement.  I'd want
the higher reliability drive in that case.  I'd rather pay a bit more
each drive, and then not have to rebuild a server because we went
cheap on the drives.  Hopefully, the server was built such that loss
of an array loses only that drive which can be restored without a
whole rebuild, but sometimes apps are unhappy with even that.

For home use, I don't want to pay for the electricity for the
additional spindles.  I used to be all about raiding my desktop
storage with at least RAID-1, but lately I've been looking at it from
a green perspective.  So once again, give me the better drive.  I
don't have any redundancy, so I need to improve my odds.  The last few
years I've seen abundantly clearly how much difference there is
between business class desktops & notebooks vs. consumer class junk.
It stings to pay for it, but the heartbreaks that come later will
overwhelming make one wish to have paid more for some quality.

jmho.  ymmv.

MEG