An old theme made new

Yesterday on Slashdot was a link to an article that sounds a lot like one I published two years ago tomorrow. The main point in the article is that due to the unrecoverable-read-error rate in your standard SATA drive (10^14 bits, or 12.5TB), and the ever increasing sizes of SATA drives means that Raid 5 arrays can get to 12.5TB pretty quickly. Heck, high-end home media servers chock full of HD content can get there very fast.

While it doesn't say this in the specs page for that new Seagate drive, if you look on page 18 of the accompanying manual you can see the "Nonrecoverable read error" rate of the same 10^14 as I talked about two years ago. So, no improvement in reliability. However.... For their enterprise-class "Savvio" drives, they list a "Nonrecoverable Read Error" rate of 10^16 (1 in 1.25PB), which is better than the 10^15 (125TB) they were doing two years ago on their FC disks. So clearly, enterprise users are juuuust fine for large RAID5 arrays.

As I said before, the people who are going to be bitten by this will be home media servers. Also, whiteboxed homebrew servers for small/medium businesses will be at risk. So those of you who have to justify buying the really expensive disks, when there are el-cheepo 1.5TB drives out there? You can use this!