[Beowulf] Consumer vs. Enterprise Hard Drives in Clusters

[Greg Lindahl]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 04:19:55PM -0800, Jon Forrest wrote:

> The
> last time I checked, the enterprise drives were ~25%
> more expensive than the consumer drives. This difference
> might have changed since then.

Last time I checked, it was +$10 on a $300 drive. I bought
the enterprise drives.

My local system reseller claims there's a substantial difference in
return rate. I'd love to have harder data.

> What's interesting about this is that *both* the consumer
> (e.g Barracuda 7200.11) and enterprise (e.g. Barracuda ES.2)
> versions of the Seagate drives have the same firmware problem,
> or at least are suffering from the same firmware bug.
> This makes me wonder about how different their firmware must be.

If they did have different firmware, I'd bet that most of it would be
similar. Of course, I'm just guessing, and so are you.

> I'm glad I've been buying the consumer drives because, at least
> as far as this problem is concerned, my life wouldn't have been
> improved if I had spent the extra money for the enterprise drives.

That makes a lot of sense.

-- greg