Re: Hardware/OS recommendations for large databases (

David Boreham wrote:
> >Spend a fortune on dual core CPUs and then buy crappy disks... I bet
> >for most applications this system will be IO bound, and you will see a
> >nice lot of drive failures in the first year of operation with
> >consumer grade drives.
>
> I guess I've never bought into the vendor story that there are
> two reliability grades. Why would they bother making two
> different kinds of bearing, motor etc ? Seems like it's more
> likely an excuse to justify higher prices. In my experience the
> expensive SCSI drives I own break frequently while the cheapo
> desktop drives just keep chunking along (modulo certain products
> that have a specific known reliability problem).
>
> I'd expect that a larger number of hotter drives will give a less reliable
> system than a smaller number of cooler ones.

Our SCSI drives have failed maybe a little less than our IDE drives.
Hell, some of the SCSIs even came bad when we bought them. Of course,
the IDE drive failure % is inflated by all the IBM Deathstars we got -- ugh.

Basically, I've found it's cooling that's most important. Packing the
drives together into really small rackmounts? Good for your density, not
good for the drives. Now we do larger rackmounts -- drives have more
space in between each other plus fans in front and back of the drives.