Emmanuel Computer Consulting, L.L.C.

Not too long after the market punished the Hard Disk industry for dropping warranties before the industry is now moving to cratering hard disk warranties again.  I bet they are going to be introducing a new technology for manufacturing hard disks and they are dropping the warranties until the industry works the bugs out.  Be forewarned and check the length of the warranty of any hard disk you buy.  If it isn’t at least 3 years i would not buy it.

Some desktop and notebook barebones drives will have their warranties slashed from 5 years to 1 year.

Last week, Western Digital revealed that it was cutting the warranty on its Caviar Blue/Green and Scorpio Blue drives from three years to two years. Now, it looks like Seagate just couldn’t stand by and let Western Digital have all fun when it comes to cutting hard drive warranties.

The Register is reporting that Seagate is upping the ante by slashing some warranties from five years down to one year. Here are some of the “highlights” of the warranty cuts:

Constellation 2 and ES.2 drives: 5 years reduced to 3 years

Barracuda and Barracuda Green drives: 5 years reduced to 1 year

Barracuda XT: 5 years reduced to 3 years

Momentus 2.5-inch (5400 and 7200rpm): 5 years reduced to 1 year

Momentus XT: 5 years reduced to 3 years

via DailyTech – Seagate Joins Western Digital in HDD Warranty Massacre, Doubles Down with 1-Year Warranties.

SSD’s are so fast that if you use more than one SSD(which you have to for ANY RAID) you may just hit a wall due to the RAID controllers not being fast enough to keep up.  What’s interesting is at one point they went to purely software RAID and saw the kind of speed increases they knew they should have been seeing.  RAID cards used to be a bottleneck but they got much much faster than any magnetic drive or groups of magnetic drives could get to…now they are once again the bottleneck.  I wonder how long it’s going to take for the RAID card manufacturers to catch up?

Here’s a three part article about SSD’s from an enterprise point of view.  It’s a good series.  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The author has other articles as well here, here, here.

SSD versus Enterprise SAS and SATA disks – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News.

The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News.

I don’t know why I didn’t blog this last year.  It’s becoming more and more relevant though as folks start diving into SSD’s without realizing the major differences between SSD’s and mechanical hard disks.

AMD Does RAID On a Chip – www.enterprisestorageforum.com.

This thing is FRAID or software raid.  It’s no better than ICHx or any other chipset based “raid” system.   When you see somehting like this:

Dot Hill’s RAIDCore technology enables host-based RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and 50 directly on motherboard SATA I/O ports, and the same software stack with additional features enabled may also be used for SAS systems that use a built-in or PCIe host adapter-based SAS/SATA chipset.

Also a bit a googling reveals a small thread where I already researched this:

http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/centos@centos.org/1580168.html

The host based is what gives it away.  Anything that is host based puts the processing load on your cpu.  In the case of RAID 5 or 6 that load is high. Never turn this garbage on..use a real RAID controller.