[mythtv-users] Should I use LVM on this new raid?

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu f-myth-users at media.mit.edu
Wed Sep 26 22:53:25 UTC 2007


    > Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:39:46 -0400
    > From: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com>

    > So that implies to me that people really believe that business will
    > *pay* a 6:1 or more price imbalance for those drives, for no good
    > reason.

Bought any bottled water recently?

Seriously:  In many places, what comes out of the tap is better than
what's in the bottle, at about a 9 -thousand- to 1 price ratio.  Not
to mention all the other badness in the lifecycle costs that you may
or may not be paying for directly (fuel to truck all those bottles
around, fuel to make the plastic [energy & the plastic itself], fuel
to recycle them...).  And yet, people will pay an -enormous- premium
on ZERO data just because it makes them feel better and they can't be
bothered to check the facts.  (Yes, occasionally they buy it for the
portability.  But why, then, don't the vast majority just -save- a
single bottle and refill it from the tap?  Yet they don't.)

I have -absolutely- no problem believing that many businesses will pay
"protection money" for a warm fuzzy feeling that has no grounding in
reality---especially if it -might once have- and nobody's rigorously
investigated whether it still holds.  And consider---a -business- will
pay almost any amount for a disk if they value its contents, because
just having to swap it out will cost them more in personnel time and
downtime (or degraded-RAID time, or chance-of-two-failures-before-rebuild)
than the price differential.  -And-, the guy who pays this protection
money can then say, "Hey, I bought the most expensive disks out there.
They -must- be good or they couldn't charge that, right?  So the fact
that the disk failed isn't MY fault!"---and he keeps his job.

It's just another manifestation of the old pre-MS saw that went,
"Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM."  Regardless of how much
more expensive it was.

P.S.  Unless your sample size is -very- large, the low failure rates
of disks in general mean that you don't actually have statistical
significance to your data---and people are excellent at deducing
patterns were no actual patterns are present.  That's the whole reason
that "statistical significance" exists.


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