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Because if you're providing services to a large business, you're typically not managing servers with physical disks attached. You're using a SAN with fiber conn
by greedo 3y ago
Because if you're providing services to a large business, you're typically not managing servers with physical disks attached. You're using a SAN with fiber connections or NFS mounts. Most SANs require specific drives sold by the vendor with firmware they've tested, mounted to custom sleds etc. You can't just connect a WD Mybook drive.
Mom and Pop businesses using single servers can do all they want in regards to drives, I don't care. I would argue they shouldn't have servers, but if you do have servers, you should at minimum use RAID etc, not a drive plugged into your USB port.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoIf you are in that situation, then obviously you have to do what you have to do. Absolutely none of that has to apply to the sort of situation we are talking about here. The only real reason to spend more per disk is when you know all your disks are going to fail, and extending the lifespan per average disk will definitely save you more than the enterprise markup costs. So you better have dozens or hundreds of disks in the first place. For any truly valuable data, you should at minimum have a backup in one different physical location. That backup should be include at least one redundant disk. None of that is worth spending a dime on more expensive hardware.
- greedo 3y agoYou try telling a VP that their business unit can't function because you decided to purchase the cheaper drive. All disks fail eventually. Outliers may run longer than the MTBF for that drive model, but they all fail eventually. And backups are fine for restoring data, but they don't help provide access to that data in a timely fashion. That's why people use SANs, AWS etc. The cost of a SAN storage array is a nit for a business making cars (like Toyota) or selling insurance (like my company).
- thomastjeffery 3y agoIt's very unlikely for all of your disks to fail at the same time. Even if they do, that's why you have an offsite backup. The name of the game is redundancy, not longevity. In practically every use case, two consumer disks will be better than one enterprise disk. Once you start failing enough disks often enough, longevity can be worth the additional cost. Until then, it just isn't.
- greedo 3y agoActually, it's not uncommon for a batch of disk from a vendor (the same lot #) to have failures. And again, a backup is fine for deleted data, or fire/ransomware. But for day to day operations, no one is really willing to wait for you to restore from a local backup, much less an offsite backup.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago> no one is really willing to wait And they are willing to wait for you to rebuild your raid array? Either you lost your data from a disk failure, or you are waiting to lose your data from a disk failure. How are we not on the same page here?
- greedo 3y agoI think if you had worked/managed a SAN, you might realize that a single disk failure is a non-event. I'm not talking about a JBOD or an storage shelf using RAID5, I'm talking about a Netapp or similar system that can easily handle disk failures without interrupting service.