On Mon, 2002-06-10 at 03:46, Alvin Oga wrote:
>
> - and if the drives gonna fail... i say its more likely to die
> within the first 30 days ...
Yes. MTBF only measures how likely it is to fail during the middle of
its life.
A good number die early (defective) and late (worn out). Not many die
in
the middle. That's what MTBF measures.
I was speaking of the MTBF of RAID-0 where any one disk death means
the
whole array is gone.
> - what's the likelyhood of 2 drives that fail ...
> rendering the raid subsystem to be just blank disks..
Not much. Especially if you replace the failed disk promptly, or have
a
spare.
> ( hopefully one can rest a little better after the first
disk
> ( dies... or is more of the same fate to happen to the rest
of
> ( the disks ...
Neither. Unless the failure was due to the environment (e.g., running
disks at 120 degress in a paint can shaker), having one fail makes
others neither more likely nor less likely to fail.
>
> - i still prefer 1 large disks.. instead of many small ones...
If you have many small disks and one fails, you are OK, as long as you
used RAID 1 or RAID 4/5. You can replace the one failed disk.
If your one large disk fails, you're down until you restore from
backups.