[Beowulf] Re: Cooling vs HW replacement

[Bill Broadley]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 10:26:36AM -0700, Josip Loncaric wrote:
> I'd just like to offer my personal guesses of what manufacturers of 
> commodity disk drives want to achieve: product lifespan of about 5 
> years, infant mortality under 1%.

I was looking at drive spec sheets and found the Maxtor Diamondmax 10
300GB drive.  From the spec sheet:

Start/Stop cycles (min)      >50,000
Component Design Live (min)  5 years
Annualized Return Rate (ARR) < 1%

I don't have any personal experience with these drives, but it does
look like particularly useful numbers for a spec sheet, especially when
compared to MTBF.  To make MTBF numbers even worse many posted numbers
don't include the duty cycle.

Sony bragged about higher MTBF with AIT vs DLT, only in the back of
a 50 page document did they mention a 10% duty cycle vs the 100% duty
cycle for the DLT numbers.

-- 
Bill Broadley
Computational Science and Engineering
UC Davis