[Beowulf] Big storage

[Joe Landman]

Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:

[...]

> "The probability of the disk failing to read back data is the same as
> it was long ago, so today you can expect at least one failed read every
> 10TB to 100TB. But the reconstruction of a failed 500GB disk in an
> 11-disk array has to read 5TB, so there can be an unacceptably large
> chance of failure to rebuild every one of the 1 billion sectors on the
> failed disk."

It gets worse.  At some point in capacity, you can no longer assume all 
disks are operational all the time, reading in an non-error state. 
Unfortunately for us, this capacity is (as Garth and others have pointed 
out) really close by.  Well within an order of magnitude of the capacity 
of a single drive.  This means it is well within the capacity of a 
standard RAID.


-- 

Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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