[PLUG] Using a hard disk with single bad sector.

Michael C. Robinson michael at goose.robinson-west.com
Thu Sep 11 19:32:02 UTC 2003


So in ATA it takes fewer platters for higher capacity because of lower
rotational speeds allowing the use of thicker platters than in higher
performance drives.  Does the RPM contribute significantly to heat and
vibration sensitivity?  

If I want to raid 4 ATA disks together to take advantage of striping to
increase speed, can't I overcome heat and vibration problems by mounting
them significantly apart from each other in seperate racks or cages? 
I've seen IBM personal computers where the second hard drive mounts
about the power supply and the first mounts in a totally different
and distant location in the case.

If you build a raid over multiple machines the problem of being limited
to 2 to 4 drives becomes less significant, speed suffers though because
of low data transfer rates between machines.
One approach I could think of is to have multiple nics
between each box increasing inter machine throughput where
at $30 a card one time cost for a 100 mbps nic it seems fairly 
reasonably to increase the number of cards by 2. 
One gigabit card in each box in your raid cluster might 
be a better way to combat the bottleneck.

     --  Michael




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