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
On Fri, 5 Sep 1997 sirbruce@ix.netcom.com wrote:
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...
I've seen that happen many times, especially on a SCSI bus (which can be notorious for phantom errors). In this case, one drive was a narrow 4GB from an F220, and the other was a wide 4GB from an F230. The filers were purchased months apart, and it is unlikely the two drives came off the same production run.
Another possibility - higher performing components will fail faster, generally speaking. Perhaps the Netapp drives provide better performance for lower MTBF (doubtful, but worth mentioning).
Yeah, doubtful. ;-) Our third-party drives were bought to Netapp's specs, down to the firmware revision. The canisters were supplied by OSS, who stock Digital StorageWorks products. The only difference there is the wiring leading to the two LED's on the front cover.
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Brian Tao -
sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com