[mythtv-users] OT: help selecting drives for server

[Matthew McClement]

David Brodbeck wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2009 10:28 am, Brian Wood wrote:
>> I'd be curious as to why WD doesn't suggest using the cheaper drives for
>> RAID
>> systems, other than the obvious fact that most RAID systems are used in
>> enterprise systems where the user can afford to pay more.
> 
> My understanding -- which may be incorrect -- is that the RAID drives
> won't try as hard to recover bad sectors.  A large number of retries is
> desirable in a standalone drive, but can cause a drive to time out and be
> kicked out of a RAID array.  In a RAID situation it's better to just fail
> the sector and move on, since the controller will recover the data using
> the other drives.

It's more than just recovery time from a URE. You also have
RV(rotational vibration) tolerances, better MTBF's that cover 24x7
usage, workload management(like doing read-after-write under certain
thermal conditions) and better ECC coverage(cache, disk, datapath).

Whether any of that matters for personal media storage however is
debatable. I'd argue it doesn't.

Matt

P.S. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 is an amusing
demonstration of why RV ratings can matter