I work for a storage company. And have been in the storage industry for abut 8 years now.
And here is the problem with this whole story.
"...data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an [unrecoverable read error]."
Why is this almost certain? I haven't seen this happen...ever...to the extent that the RAID set wouldn't rebuild. That's, like, the job of RAID 5.
Yes, it will take longer to rebuild 2TB drives. And people are building faster RAID contollers.
You can always do RAID 1 (which isn't dead, but sure is damn expensive). And with the advent of SSDs...and RAID controllers with a shit load of write cache...you can do what TMS does and RAID 1 from your 128GB SSDs (however many you may have in your array) to a set of SATA disks (which can themselves be mirrored). This way you have multiple failure domains. And although you lose performance, you don't lose DATA.
There are always smart people out there to solve such problems...but I see that it's quite sexy to just call something dead.
I like the term (from Princess Bride) "Mostly Dead".
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I work for a storage company. And have been in the storage industry for abut 8 years now. And here is the problem with this whole story. "...data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an [unrecoverable read error]." Why is this almost certain? I haven't seen this happen...ever...to the extent that the RAID set wouldn't rebuild. That's, like, the job of RAID 5. Yes, it will take longer to rebuild 2TB drives. And people are building faster RAID contollers. You can always do RAID 1 (which isn't dead, but sure is damn expensive). And with the advent of SSDs...and RAID controllers with a shit load of write cache...you can do what TMS does and RAID 1 from your 128GB SSDs (however many you may have in your array) to a set of SATA disks (which can themselves be mirrored). This way you have multiple failure domains. And although you lose performance, you don't lose DATA. There are always smart people out there to solve such problems...but I see that it's quite sexy to just call something dead. I like the term (from Princess Bride) "Mostly Dead".