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I don't believe reliability has ever necessarily been an "enterprise" feature. The concrete features I understand "enterprise" drives as having are: 1) firmwa
by sliverstorm 12y ago
I don't believe reliability has ever necessarily been an "enterprise" feature.
The concrete features I understand "enterprise" drives as having are:
1) firmware is built with RAID in mind. This might sound weird, but consumer drives are more likely to have problems with RAID, just because they aren't designed for it. See, for example, the first WD Green drives crashing RAID clusters because some timeout was too high.
2) Longer warranty period
3) This may not be true anymore, but I believe they typically feature larger cache
4) ECC
[1]: http://www.pantz.org/hardware/disks/what_makes_a_hard_drive_enterprise_class.html http://www.pantz.org/hardware/disks/what_makes_a_hard_drive_...
- acdha 12y agoAt every sales-pitch I've ever attended, the enterprise vendors mention “reliability” about every other word – the message that your boss will fire you for taking risks unless you buy their hardware is communicated with the subtlety of a solar eclipse. As for the RAID point, you'd very much want to find real data for that. I've heard similar folklore but have also heard plenty of lost data stories from enterprise disks in enterprise RAID. If I were building out a large storage farm, I'd strongly consider forgoing hardware RAID altogether and using something like ZFS so it'd be observable.
- wmf 12y agoBeing optimized for RAID basically means TLER and possibly never spinning down.
- sliverstorm 12y agoheard plenty of lost data stories from enterprise disks in enterprise RAID If you've ever worked with enterprise RAID, that should not surprise you! RAID is powerful, but also so easy to botch...