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All of this is playing with statistics. Lower the reliability on the
drives raises the probability of a failure. Multiply times the number of
drives in the array and it gets that much worse. Lose 2 and it hurts
bad. Now if you have a small system with good backups and you need to
restore, while this is bad, it's doable.In 2 to 4 hours and you can
Restore 21 a full system even up to several hundred GB. But suppose you
have several TB of stuff. You don't want to lose a RAID set ever. You
purchase redundant cache or better yet you go Mirrored. You also
appreciate the reliability of the 'expensive' disks, controllers, buses,
power supplies etc. So if the guy with lots of storage in his iSeries
gets reliable drives, so do you! It makes no economic sense for IBM to
purchase two different reliability levels of drives - that just
increases the costs for everyone. You want cheap junk drives, buy Dell.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen a Dell server lose a drive in
a RAID set but end up losing data anyway because the RAID controller
couldn't do the rebuild correctly or because there were actually more
drives than one that were dead. Most recently I spent last Thursday
evening helping a customer rebuild one that failed just that way. He
has never lost a drive on any of his iSeries machines and is asking
(good) questions like "So can't I put this stuff on the iSeries? That
thing never fails." We're working on that...!
Like the guy with the oil filter said in the commercial: "You can pay me
now, or pay me later!"
- Larry
rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Come to think of it, since we are RAID-5 protected, even if we did have to
replace 10 or more drives in our various iSeries per year I might be
willing to risk it at the much lower price. Provided they never happened
at the same time in the same raid set. (Like there's any guarantee that
the mega expensive drives wouldn't. Last disk message was a card that
needed reseating that falsely indicated that 14 drives hurled.)
Rob Berendt
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