As drives get larger, the number required to provide a given level of storage is reduced, and redundancy is the normal procedure for any large operation.

The drive issues cited are normal with any technology, and have been with uf for a very long time. I manage a room of machines that have been running for many years, and the modern machines as well as the early ones all run raid, regardless of the technology used in the drive array.

For performance we use raid-10, which can frequently see multiple drive failures. We uae a quality drive controller for many systems (3ware) and software raid for many others (typically scsi based systems). I don’t see many multiple failures, but there have been a few. In one case the machine was simple a test machine, and the programmers wanted it to fail, so they ignored it’s dead drive for two years… And some of our large raid 10 systems would see multiple failures when a critical fan would fail… In all of our raid 10 arrays we have been lucky in never loosing two drives from a single mirrored pair.

But the point is that drives fail… they always have, and they probably always will. Sounding an alarm because someone may have a lot of drives spinning is silly. Anyone with that many drives will have a sutably sized staff keeping the systems running. I have seens rooms full of spinning hard drives for years. When I was a teen, I remember a tour of a university lab with a whole room full of disk drives, feeding a system in the next room that took about 20 hours to fully boot (after several media changes)… And there was a staff of people there to fix it when things went bad. the only thing that has changed is drived are smaller, faster, and hold more data, with a single drive holding more data than 100 rooms did in the 70′s.

I just don’t get what the big deal is… Is this the first time this author has ever stopped to do the math on drive failures?

I have 48 drives in the room I am in now (my home office) and several drives have failed over time with this equipment… Sata has brought with it better drives with more speed and fewer failures… yet they still fail, so I’m supposed to be scared?

Geez…