On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 05:28:34PM +0000, Joseph L. Casale wrote: > >> I also heard that disks above 1TB might have reliability issues. > >> Maybe it changed since then... > >> > > > >I remember rumors about the early 2TB Seagates. > > > >Personally, I won't RAID SATA drives over 500GB unless they're > >enterprise-level ones with the limits on how long before the drive > >reports a problem back to the host when it has a read error. > > > >Which should also take care of the reliability issue to a large > >degree. > > An often overlooked issue is the rebuild time with Linux software > raid and all hw raid controllers I have seen. On large drives the > times are so long as a result of the sheer size, if the array is > degraded you are exposed during the rebuild. ZFS's resilver has this > addressed as good as you can by only copying actual data. > > With this in mind, it's wise to consider how you develop the > redundancy into the solution... Very true... especially with 1TB+ drives you definitely are crazy to run anything other than RAID-6. Lately we've been buying 24 bay systems from Silicon Mechanics, installing Solaris 10 and running RAID-Z2 + SSD for L2ARC and ZIL. Makes for great NFS storage... The next release of Solaris 10 should have RAID-Z3 which might be better for the >1TB drives out there. (You can of course do this with OpenSolaris as well and something similar on CentOS albeit not with ZFS). When we need a little higher level of HA and "Enterprise-ness" we go NetApp. Just. Works. :) Ray