I have been seeing a lot of people using 1.5Tb and greater hard drives lately, and find myself getting pretty uncomfortable about them using plain old RAID5 for 12-16 1.5Tb drives.
With the failure rate of SATA drives not being something to smile about, and the length of time required to rebuild arrays of this size, […]

I was madly making RAID arrays the other day to do some testing, when a message popped up on the screen … “The selected configuration allows for the creation of a logical device with Enclosure Level Redundancy. This will override any second-level devices selection that you have made. Do you want to configure Enclosure Level […]

All the hype in Australia at the moment is the National Broadband Network … basically fibre to the node everywhere (fibre to all homes and businesses). Now no-one believes it’s going to happen in the next 6 months but the current government has a firm commitment to get this going.
So what implications will that have […]

I’ve been getting a lot of requests lately from people putting together massive storage “buckets” … 16 or more 1.5 or 2tb drives in a single array to provide a large storage container for whatever their data is (they don’t normally tell me that). However, they all so … “performance is not an issue”. […]

I’m sitting here in Hong Kong airport with less than half an hour to knock over some emails and wake this blog up again (or myself, whichever comes first). Why only half and hour? Is the flight home leaving soon? No. As a matter of fact I have another three hours sitting in this bar […]

So the wife was right after all these years (I can say that here because I can definitely, exactly and almost confidently say that (a) she doesn’t read this and (b) doesn’t listen to a word I say about “blogs” and other computer related stuff).
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/articles/35314-EMC-Cisco-accused-of-FUDfest-Apple-hammered-NetApp-accused-of-PR-BS-as-IBM-and-HDS-fight
(you’ll have to read down the page to get my point)
There […]

One x 2.5″ device (laptop thickness) which is a drive carrier (not an actual drive).
This device needs to be able to carry 2 x 1.8″ 320gb SSD drives in RAID1 configuration.
When device is developed please send to Adaptec … I’ll evaluate it in my laptop for a very long time.
Obviously just gone through the pain […]

I’m noticing a slow but consistent change in people’s attitudes towards RAID types lately. It mostly has to do with the price and size of SATA disks. It seems that RAID5 is just not considered necessary, relevant or even suitable these days.
In days gone by RAID10 was always available, but considered way too expensive for […]

The wife hit the roof this morning. Literally. From July 1 the price I pay for electricity increased by 20% … ouch. This is a significant increase in the running cost of a home and a business. It’s a wake-up call for me to get serious about looking at exactly what uses electricity in both […]

Once upon a time I coined a phrase “SQL = SAS”. Our marketing department dismissed it as not having enough words in it to keep them all employed so it was relegated to a printout on my wall of ideas.
However … I think I may now have to agree with our marketing department (damn that […]