Malay wrote: > Interesting discussion everyone. My limited experience says given the > price of redundant but cheap systems and reliable but expensive system, > one should go for cheapest systems that serves your purpose and > redundancy than reliable and more expensive system. To elaborate, two There is a story running around about this. Some airplane manufacturer built a small plane with your choice of engines. First engine was a single (unknown manufacturer) high quality and more expensive turboprop. Second was a dual (also unknown manufacturer) "reasonable" quality piston engine. Turns out that the company sold the benefits of "cheaper but redundant" to its audience. The buyers who purchased them, looked at the statistics for failures, noted that even with the redundant pair, if one failed, you were pretty much in quite a bit of trouble. The point being, if you are going to bet your life, or your data on something, it makes sense to go with hard data as compared to speculation. The cheapest drives around, Maxtors and their ilk have seen failure rates higher than 3-4% in desktop and other apps. Sure, you will save a buck or two on the front end (acquisition). Unless you can tolerate data loss, do you want to deal with the impact on the back end? Without trying to FUD here, how much precisely is your data worth, how many thousands or millions of dollars (or euros, or ...) have been spent collecting it? Once you frame the question in terms of how much risk you can afford, you start looking at how to ameliorate the risk. There are simple, (relatively) inexpensive methods. N+1 supplies adds *marginal* additional cost to a unit. Using better drives (notice I didn't say FC/SCSI/SATA), adds minute costs to the unit. Using intelligent redundancy (RAID6 with hot spares, mirrored,...) reduces risk at an increase in cost. We are not talking about EMC costs here. Or NetAPP. If you are spending north of $2.5/GB of space you are probably overspending, though this is a function of what it is and what technology you are buying. > separate machines with cheap components (chapest SATA drives with single > power supply) is better that one expensive machine (higher quality hard > drives, redundant power supply). What you Gurus say? I believe that you can save money at the most appropriate places to do so. Im not sure this is it. Its your data, and you have to deal with/answer for what happens if a disk or machine demise makes it un-recoverable. People whom have not had a loss event usually dont get this (e.g. it hasnt bitten them personally). If you have ever lost data due to a failure, and it cost you lots of time/energy/sweat/money to recover or replicate this, you quickly realize that the "added" cost is a steal, a bargin in comparison with your time. Which you should value highly (your employer does, and rarely do they want you spending time on data recovery, unless this is your job, as compared to what you are paid to do). > > -Malay > _______________________________________________ > Bioclusters maillist - Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org > https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics LLC, email: landman at scalableinformatics.com web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 786 8423 fax : +1 734 786 8452 cell : +1 734 612 4615