Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:15:01 +0200 (CEST) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, koitsu@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: problems with Hitachi 1TB SATA drives Message-ID: <200707250815.l6P8F1ah056911@lurza.secnetix.de> In-Reply-To: <20070724182604.GA3759@eos.sc1.parodius.com>
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Jeremy Chadwick wrote: > * Hard disks are growing in capacity, but are not growing in physical > size. We're pushing 1TB in a 3.5" form factor. And the same applies to > laptop (2.5") drives. The margin of error continues to increase as we > try to cram more and more data in such a small medium. I personally > would *love* to see drives go back to using a 5.25" form factor, > especially for large capacity disks, since chances are it means higher > reliability (read: less chance of error). As far as reliability goes, I agree. However, the problem is, you cannot make 5.25" disks spin at 10 or 15 krpm. Well, maybe you can, but it's a hell of an engineering problem. Even 7200 rpm isn't trivial to do for such large discs. And who wants to buy a slow 3600 rpm 5.25" drive? Apart from that, the larger radius also means slower end-to-end movement for the heads. > * All this leads me to the topic of backups. Hard disks are growing in > capacity at a rate which the backup industry cannot follow. It's > getting to the point where you have to buy hard drives to back up the > data on other hard drives, but anyone with half a brain knows RAID is > not a replacement for backups. Correct, RAID and backups are completely different. But you can use disk drives for both. I solved my backup problem by putting a hot-swap ATA frame into my home server (they're pretty cheap nowadays), and using a bunch of ATA disks as removable media. It's just like tape backups, but much cheaper, faster and easier to use. It beats every tape technology hands down. > going to sit around once a week backing up a terabyte of data to ~120 > dual-layer 8.5GB DVDs? I wouldn't even start thinking about considering that. > The closest thing out there right now is > a product from IOMega called REV, which (at most) offers 70GB of storage > per disk, or 140GB with compression. > > A new IOMega REV (which includes one 70GB disk) costs US$600 MSRP. You > read that right. Ugh. For US$600 you get four 400 GB disk drives, including four trays and one frame (hot-swap capable). That's 1.6 TB of backup capacity. Compare that to 70 GB. I also guess that that "REV" thing is much slower than an ATA disk. Best regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M. Handelsregister: Registergericht Muenchen, HRA 74606, Geschäftsfuehrung: secnetix Verwaltungsgesellsch. mbH, Handelsregister: Registergericht Mün- chen, HRB 125758, Geschäftsführer: Maik Bachmann, Olaf Erb, Ralf Gebhart FreeBSD-Dienstleistungen, -Produkte und mehr: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead." -- RFC 1925
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