Lately I had an interesting debate with a friend of mine, he works for a small company which works in the IT field.
For obvious reason I will not write the name of the company nor who my friend is, anyway, what they do is the classical technical service and maintenance, servers machine deployment, system administration and so on.
These days everyone needs some kind of IT Infrastructure, everyone needs an ERP system, etc etc; obviously they have quite a lot of work with small/medium business companies.
Close to every machine they sell (except the classic desktop PCs) have a RAID; obviously I second that having a RAID is a must-have in every machine used for enterprise tasks but I also argue that there is RAID and RAID.
Many of the HDDs they use are going into NAS or low level server machine, to keep the price low and don’t have to add an external RAID controller the HDDs need to be SATA.
Nothing wrong with using SATA drives, but similarly as what can be said for RAIDs we can say that there is disk and disk.
For instance, if looking at the Western Digital HDDs lineup, it’s clear that they have two completely different series: the desktop one and the enterprise one.
These drives have different firmwares, different warranty policies and different error handling capabilities; so, another time, if the drive is going to be part of a RAID it’s very advisable to pick one of the enterprise series (Red, RAID edition or Velociraptor) because they are meant to be capable of working non-stop 24/7, they have 5 years warranty, they have a better error handling and on top they support TLER.
So, how people who are supposed to know what they are doing sell NAS with Caviar Blue HDDs instead of Caviar Red/RE? Why they don’t know what TLER is? Why they keep using RAID-5 when everyone know it’s crap?
My friend said they have more than 250 machines build with consumer desktop drives configured in RAID and so far they are having no problem; what they are failing to realize is that sooner or later the crap they are selling will explode under their chairs.
The whole internet is full of people complaining about consumer disks with not TREL support being dropped from RAIDs, same can be said for RAID-5 in which a second disk fails during the array rebuilding.
They remind me of the retards which use 4 HDDs in RAID-1 thinking that this way their data are safe, probably they don’t know that RAID is not a backup and that a broken controller or a much simpler file system corruption could possibly make their 4 disks mirror completely useless.
Well, guess sooner or later they will learn it the hard way…