SuperMicro H8SSL-i (ServerWorks HT1000) -- providing technical information

[Peter Arremann]

On Wednesday 07 December 2005 19:01, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Most people don't know that Hitachi fabs many of Western
> Digital's drives, which was previously done by IBM before
> they sold to Hitachi GST.  I'm not sure who Western Digital
> is using for some of their newer models though.
Yeah - HGST makes the WD drives except possibly the Raptors. There are a few 
reports that say the Raptor line is made by Seagate but no one seems to know 
for sure.

> After IBM put 5 platters in its infamous 75GXP (something
> Hitachi recently did in its new 500GB version -- stupid
> IMHO), there was a number of storage articles on all this.
> IBM went so far as to putting a "hard" warranty limitation on
> usage over 14x5.  Now I seriously doubt that IBM could
> enforce that on end-users, but it surely did on OEMs --
> especially integrators.
There is actually a class action suite out there against IBM over the 75GB 
disks. Most people say it was because of too little space between the 
platters and therefore the little tollerance to shock/heat...
Do you know if the 500GB Hitachi drives have the same reliability issues?



OK - I've one more question... Does the reliability of a single disk really 
matter much in your environment anymore? We run a few hundret servers with 
anything from ancient 1GB SCSI disks to newer 400GB sata drives. Raid in one 
form or another. There were several instances where we lost data. 
One time we had a dead director and when it died the EMC somehow ended up 
writing bad data to the drive. 
Another time, we lost data because of a backplane in a E450 - it fried the 
circuit boards on several drives at once. 
Just recently we lost data on several SUN 3510. Seagate OEM fibre 15K rpm 
disks.
I can however not remember a single time over the past several years where we 
lost data because of enough disks in a raid going bad at the same time. If 
anything happened, the hot spare always kicked in and the rebuilt went fine 
and everyone was happy. You throw out the bad disk and pop in a new one. 

Peter.