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"...you'll never have hot-swappable everything managed by ultra fast robotic arms that replace hard drives in seconds." Does anyone know anything more about th

• ceejayoz 8y ago
  I've seen it done for tape libraries. My understanding is that the biggies - Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. - don't bother with individual drive replacements (and certainly not with an expensive robotic arm system). They wait for an entire rack to fault over a certain percentage and then just swap out the whole thing.
  • q3k 8y ago
    Robotic tape libraries (like the StorageTek/Sun/Oracle SL8500) are standard. However, the robotic part is not to swap parts in case of failure - instead, it is to let ~64 tape drives access ~100k individual tapes within the library and ~inf tapes in off-site storage (as the data stored is not, and _shouldn't_ be, directly accessible).
  • ADefenestrator 8y ago
    Depends on the case. Facebook at least generally replaces drives as they go. In a pipelined fashion rather than as they fail, though. So, a given drive failure doesn't lead to immediate emergency replacement, but sometime in the next few days as someone makes a drive-replacement pass through that area.