Totally incorrect. Ok, go ahead and build me a home built storage array with 1TB SATA drives off the shelf. Then, 3 years from now, when one of your drives fails and you don't have any spares, try to find a new one that matches the exact geometry of the existing one.
What's that? You can't buy that exact drive so now your homemade RAID 5 is running in degraded mode and you hope it will stay up long enough to copy your data off onto another system? Sucks to be you, you tried to save a few bucks and got burned.
In the enterprise, we pay big bucks because we want to KNOW that we can call an 800 number and get an exact replacement hard drive, even if they stopped selling them 3 years ago.
* Then, 3 years from now, when one of your drives fails and you don't have any spares, try to find a new one that matches the exact geometry of the existing one.*
With arrays I build, I don't have onerous constraints like requiring identical size[1]. Moreover, if I'm not already already retiring disks at the 3 year mark, I'm very much remiss in my duties.
* Sucks to be you, you tried to save a few bucks and got burned.*
We're not talking about a few bucks. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's enough to pay a salary for those 3 years as well as having replaced with something less than a couple generations old.
[1] I assumethat's what you mean, since true geometry is all but impossible to detect on modern drives.
What's that? You can't buy that exact drive so now your homemade RAID 5 is running in degraded mode and you hope it will stay up long enough to copy your data off onto another system? Sucks to be you, you tried to save a few bucks and got burned.
In the enterprise, we pay big bucks because we want to KNOW that we can call an 800 number and get an exact replacement hard drive, even if they stopped selling them 3 years ago.