[rescue] x86 power question

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 @ 15:03 -0500, John Francini said:

> However, the disks Apple certifies are server-grade mechanisms,  
> rather than the stuff that Dull slaps into their cheapo boxes.

Why would you compare the drives in Apple *servers* with the drives in
Dell *cheapo* boxes?

Dell workstations and servers pretty much use the same parts Apple does.

> You can buy bare server-grade IDE drives as well. One advertised as
> such is the Western Digital Caviar RE (Ultra PATA 100) or the SATA
> version. They're a fair bit cheaper than SCSI equivalents.

>From what I can tell, there is nothing exceptional about this drive.

The RE feature list: secure SATA connector, TLER (time limited error
recovery), diagnostics, 1 million hour MTBF, fluid bearings.

Seagate (for example) has had all of those features in their normal
drives for years now, except for two: TLER and secure SATA connector.

The secure SATA connector is nice, though SATA seems to hang on pretty
tightly anyway.

TLER is interesting: WD's error correction has in the past been
incompatible with RAID error correction. TLER is supposed to fix that.

However, as far as I know other drives don't have this problem with
their error recovery firmware in the first place.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["I want this Perl software checked for
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