[mythtv-users] How is this pricing possible?

[Raalph A]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 12:18 AM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
> On 2/22/2011 23:17, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>>> From: "Yan Seiner"<yan at seiner.com>
>>> Well, you can take advantage of the fact that myth needs high capacity,
>>> low speed. So get a sackful of 1 GB drives and build a few raid-6
>>> arrays. I've found that about 3TB is the practical limit of the
>>> technology for SATA in terms of verify and rebuild speeds. Maybe the
>>> newer controllers are faster, but when time to rebuild starts to
>>> exceed 48 hours I get a bit worried.
>> Indeed.  I gather RAID-6 avoids the "rebuild time longer than MTBF of drives"
>> problem?  :-)
>
> While the UBER (unrecoverable bit error rate) issue is a perfectly valid
> argument, it suffers from lack of any meaningful data.  This issue
> really started getting press about a year and a half ago.  Hard drives
> were advertised with an average rate of less than one UBE per 10^14
> reads, or 12.5TB.  As you started getting into the multi-terabyte
> arrays, the chances of a bit error causing a fault and data loss on a
> rebuild became troublesomely high.
>
> About a year ago, Western Digital started selling consumer drives with
> an advertised average rate of less than one UBE per 10^15 reads.  Now
> you don't just miraculously get an order of magnitude better
> reliability, and presumably WD isn't outright lying.  Presumably,
> manufacturers are just testing that the drives are 'at least this good'
> and leaving it at that.
>
> Is it a future issue people running large arrays need to be aware about?
> Certainly!  Is doom and gloom going to descend upon everyone, and
> destroy their data? No, probably not.
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I see WD offers a line of AV drives (AV-GP) that are comparable in
price with similar non-AV drives.  They say they are designed for
"always-on 24/7 applications such as media centers".  I wonder if they
truly are more suitable for a Myth implementation.