[Beowulf] petabyte for $117k

[Bill Broadley]

Greg Lindahl wrote:
> http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
> 
> Kinda neat -- how does the price compare to the various 48-drive
> systems available?

I'm very curious to hear how they are in production.  I've had vibration of
large sets of drives basically render the consumer drives useless.  Timeouts,
highly variable performance, drives constantly dropping out of raids.  It
became especially fun when the heavy I/O of a rebuild knocks additional drives
out of the array.

I'd also worry that running the consumer drives well out of spec (both in duty
cycle and vibration) might significantly shorten their lives.

Are the 7200.11 1.5TB seagate's particularly vibration resistant?

Maybe those $0.23 nylon standoffs work better than I'd expect.