[geeks] Fwd: [IP] Interesting speculation on the tech behind gmail

[Mike Meredith]

On Sun, 11 Apr 2004 00:46:06 -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Wed, 07 Apr 2004 @ 18:14 +0100, Mike Meredith said:
> > Well except in one bit accidentally ... with a large enough number
> > of disks you will need someone running around replacing the failed
> > ones on a full-time basis.
> 
> I'm not so sure.

"with a large enough number of disks".

> Drive density is tremendous now, and a petabyte fits in a smaller
> space than it used to.  With hot spares and maybe also redundancy
> among RAIDs, you should only have to do drive replacement at scheduled
> intervals.

You're right that a petabyte of storage should be able to live without a
full time disk replacement monkey.

> Large IBM mainframes were using robots for drive media over 20 years

Cue the story about the operator who went inside an MSU when it was
operating and lost his head. At which point enclosure-less MSU's
acquired perspex cages.

> Of course, hopefully they will work better than some of the tape
> robots I've had to use, which threw tapes on the floor all the time.

Haven't seen that. Mind you I do know a tape library where you can have
fun by inserting tapes upside down, but with the label the right way up.
We'll be collecting small bits of LTO tape from the bottom of this
library for a very long time, although I don't know why a library robot
arm needs to be *that* strong.

>