One aspect of my job is designing and building large-scale storage systems (often known as “SANs”, or “Storage Area Networks”). Typically, we use a tiered approach with SSD’s and HDD’s combined. That said, each one has specific benefits. SSD’s almost always have a higher Cost-per-Byte. I can get 10k SAS 4kn HDD’s with a cost-per-gigabyte … Read more
In practice, people who buy from enterprise vendors (HPE, Dell, etc.) do not worry about this. Drives sourced by these vendors are already spread across multiple manufacturers under the same part number. An HP disk under a particular SKU may be HGST or Seagate or Western Digital. Same HP part number, variation on manufacturer, lot … Read more
Drilling a hole in the drive enclosure which passes through all the platters will make it impossible to run the drive. Most modern HDDs don’t have air inside the enclosure, and you’ve let what was in there escape. You’ve filled the cavity with tiny pieces of drill swarf, which will be on everything including the … Read more
I hate to say “don’t use SATA” in critical production environments, but I’ve seen this situation quite often. SATA drives are not generally meant for the duty cycle you describe, although you did spec drives specifically rated for 24×7 operation in your setup. My experience has been that SATA drives can fail in unpredictable ways, … Read more
You can get a pretty good measure of this using the iostat tool. % iostat -dx /dev/sda 5 Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util sda 0.78 11.03 1.19 2.82 72.98 111.07 45.80 0.13 32.78 1.60 0.64 The disk utilisation is listed in the last column. This is defined as … Read more
I almost cringe to do this, but if you’re serious about recovering your data, and you don’t have backups, you’ll need a higher-end data recovery service. Watch out for fly-by-nights shops that will be peddling/scamming in your area, and go with an actual top-tier data recovery service. (And be prepared to pay $$$$ for it.) … Read more
RAID: Why and When RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (some are taught “Inexpensive” to indicate that they are “normal” disks; historically there were internally redundant disks which were very expensive; since those are no longer available the acronym has adapted). At the most general level, a RAID is a group of disks … Read more