On 09/05/97 23:28:40 you wrote:
The ironic thing is, of the 16 Netapp-supplied drives and the 12 third-party ones we are using, two drives have failed so far (since April): both were Netapp drives. :-/ At least the replacement drives were shipped promptly.
I'm not saying this *did* happen, but it's worth noting that if you have "good parts" and "bad parts" together it is possible for the *bad* part to make the *good* part fail... the drive may have sent some illegal or incompatible sequence that locked the other one up. Consider also a network card who follows the rules, but winds up getting killed by some rogue system on the network sending malformed packets. I agree, both need to be fixed, but proper compatibility can often avoid such lingering bugs.
Another possibility - higher performing components will fail faster, generally speaking. Perhaps the Netapp drives provide better performance for lower MTBF (doubtful, but worth mentioning).
Bruce