Don't try some FUD BS. Because it is total BS. And you darn well know it.

-Renegade (April 02, 2013, 12:30 PM)

Renegade, I resent the implication that I'm lying, and I think you oversell your own perception if you believe that you know what I am (or anybody else is) thinking.

It might be available to major corporations, but none of that kind of durability is available for typical IT use by SMEs.

-Renegade (April 02, 2013, 12:30 PM)

Actually, it seems to me that it was Google that pioneered the use of disposable computing hardware. Their server farms are based on consumer-grade computers packaged into rack mountings. And you don't get much more "major corporation" than that.

Everything fails. I've seen ASP applications just deteriorate after being thoroughly tested.

-Renegade (April 02, 2013, 12:30 PM)

If you think that deterioration can be built into software, in a way that's not detectable, I think your tinfoil hat is too tight. And think about it: why would the software publisher want to invest the extra development cost in order to design that "feature" in?

FWIW, RAID does not increase reliability. All it does (and can do) is minimize downtime. Two disks are twice as likely to fail as one disk.

-40hz (April 02, 2013, 12:52 PM)

It's true that RAID just has you multiplying the chance of a *single* failure. But you're also multiplying your chances of surviving a failure, at least to the extent that multiple *simultaneous* failures are geometrically less likely. It's not a perfect solution, but generally speaking, this does greatly enhance reliability: even at home, I can pretty much always rely on my RAID-1 NAS to be available.

I'm not sure I can agree with that as a general principle in that the consensus of 300 baboons is no better a decision (IMHO) that the opinion of one baboon. And from my experience, "the wisdom of crowds" is highly overrated at best - and wishful thinking more often than not. Especially when it comes to technology.

However, I do agree that 'choice' should be the exclusive prerogative of the chooser.

-40hz (April 02, 2013, 12:52 PM)

I think we're actually agreeing here. I'm not claiming that a committee can come up with a better answer applicable to everyone. Your latter statement is exactly what I'm trying to say: there does not exist any one single answer that's good for everyone, so the fact that each person can optimize it individually is a good thing.

UPDATE: 40hz and I cross-posted. I agree with everything in his later post.

Just goes to show what drives were capable of when engineered such that capacity (and price) took backseat to reliability.

-40hz (April 02, 2013, 07:51 AM)

I don't remember a time when disk product designers emphasized reliability at the expense of capacity and price. Indeed, up until the last few years, capacity was a huge concern.

And today, YOU can make the choice between capacity and reliability. The use of RAID technology allows you to decide whether you want to use part of your capacity for additional storage space, or dedicate it to redundancy in order to achieve reliability.

It think that today, putting the tradeoff directly into our hands makes us all better off. If we're all tied to a single decision made by the product designers, then the solution is only optimal for a small set of people. Now we can all optimize.

(I get tired of people pining for the good old days. These are the good old days.)