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

[Rahul Nabar]

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