how would you spend $1000 on a server?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>

| > I like Samsung, because they have "enterprise" specs (whatever that
| > means) at "consumer" price:
| >     - 1 in 10^15 non-recoverable error,
| 
| It sounds nice, but I am still going to stick with raid, and I am really
| looking forward to btrfs stabalising so we can have a filesystem with
| CRC block checks.

As I understand it, most drives "intended for consumer price points"
cannot be told to limit the time of error recovery.  This makes them
poor for RAID.

When an error is detected by the drive, it may take a
long time trying to recover.  The RAID system may interpret that as
the whole drive failing.  The RAID ability to make up for a sector
loss is thwarted.  Adding the drive back to the RAID array takes
rebuilding, during which time the redundancy is lost.  The rebuild
time is very large with current large drives.

The manufacturers wish to introduce price differentiation: I think
that enterprise and similar consumer disks are essentially the same
except for a firmware difference (giving economies of scale).  This
firmware difference makes the consumer drives unsuitable for RAID use
(allowing them to charge higher prices for the enterprise version).
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination>

If I remember correctly, Samsung is the only manufacturer not to do
this at the moment.  Please confirm this information before you act on
it.

I think that this wikipedia article is poorly written and wrong, but
still useful:
 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery>
We should do research and fix it.
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