[Beowulf] what defines "enterprise class" hard drives?

[Bruno Coutinho]

Seagate claims that their ES.2 SATA disks have higher rotational vibration
tolerance.
This could be useful if you have several disks working close to each other.


2010/8/5 Rahul Nabar <rpnabar at gmail.com>

> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com>
> wrote:
> > On Thu, 5 Aug 2010 16:47:19 -0500 Rahul Nabar <rpnabar at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >> I wanted to buy some 1 Terabyte SATA drives for our storage array
> >> and wanted to stay away from the cheap desktop stuff. But each
> >> manufacturer has some "enterprise class drives". But is there
> >> something specific to look for? Most of those seem to have a MTBF of
> >> around 1.2 million hours and a URE of about 1 in 10^15. The
> >> S.M.A.R.T. abilities seem fairly standard.  Is there a list
> >> somewhere of well tested drives? Or any recommendations?
> >
> > Why do you want to pay more for drives?
> >
> > If you have hundreds or thousands of machines, you will get failures
> > no matter what, so you will need to set up your software to deal with
> > failures no matter what. Assuming that a failure doesn't cause you
> > much harm, you might as well simply accept a slightly higher failure
> > rate in exchange for being able to pay less per node, which lets you
> > buy more nodes. You can always keep spares, and indeed, you will have
> > to in either case.
>
> Sure, I do have a RAID level on it so a failure per-se isn't disaster.
> And I wouldn't pay a $1000 dollar premium for it. But I wouldn't mind
> paying $50 more if it translates to less trips to the cluster room and
> fewer RAID rebuilds.
>
> That's why I'm trying to buy something better than a cheap run-of-the
> mill from newegg.
>
> --
> Rahul
>
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