Xyratex's recent announcement that they've qualified Hitachi's 2 TB nearline drive for their disk systems got me thinking about how the RAID techniques of the past don't really address the needs of systems with many ginormous drives. As drives get bigger I worry that basic RAID-5 protection isn't sufficient for these beasts.
For a company that isn't a household name in even the geekest of households, Xyratex plays a strategic role in the storage industry. Many of the big names in the business, most significantly former parent IBM, OEM Xyratex RAID arrays as their low to midrange products. Even more vendors use Xyratex as a supplier of JBODs and SBODs or a contract manufacturer. We should start seeing 2TB drives in arrays from better known vendors in the past few months.
My concerns aren't based on the quality or failure rate of big drives, but the time it must take to rebuild from a hot spare after a drive failure. Just as scary is the quantity of data that has to be read, processed and written to the replacement drive is comparable to the drive's error rate ...Read the full article
