OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 18th Sep 2009 13:40 UTC, submitted by Robert Escue

This is an article which discusses the increase in storage capacity while performance and hard error rates have not improved significantly in years, and what this means for protecting data in large storage systems. "The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology's limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future â" and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable."

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RE[2]: Henry's article is years behind the times

by jwwf on Mon 21st Sep 2009 03:20 UTC in reply to "RE: Henry's article is years behind the times"

Member since:
2006-01-19

Is it? I can't think of too many companies that are betting the farm on SATA storage in terms of performance or reliability. How are 7,200 RPM SATA disks going to compare to a 4 GB Fibre Channel array using 15,000 RPM disks, there not. SATA only beats FC in terms of capacity and cost.

If your budget (in money, power, and space) is truly unlimited, you're right. But what if you can choose, say, mirrored SATA or parity raid fibre given the constraints at hand? What if you can choose SATA that is half full, versus fibre at 80% ? What if you can afford more SATA spindles? I don't think it is that clear cut given the normal constraints.

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