I came across this article from Network Computing’s Howard Marks. He writes about a two new study’s from Carnegie Mellon and Google about hard drive reliability. The short story is that hard drives die in bunches and the massive sizes of SATA and other drives put organizations at risk of data loss from multiple disk failures. Howard Marks recommends using RAID 6 for all drives 500GB and larger. It’s a worthwhile read for storage managers. Enjoy
The Truth About Storage Reliability
UPDATE: I called EMC today to ask if they support RAID 6 on any of their arrays. I couldn’t find it in documentation, and I felt it was worth asking. They said that do no not support it at all, and there is no known plan to support it.
UPDATE 2: Things have changed since I orignially posted this. The Clariion CX-xxx series still doesn’t support RAID 6. The CX3-xx series does support RAID 6. Thanks to Dr. Product for pointing this out.
Techno babble from an IT guy named Harry 