| From: Dave Ihnat <dihnat@xxxxxxxxxx> | If you're concerned about | reliability, vendors have "RAID certified" drives available; they're usually | only a few bucks more than standard OEM off-the-shelf units. Are you sure? The economics make mechanical differentiating of products expensive. In other words, the "RAID certified drives" are very likely physically the same as the desktop drives unless they charge a lot more (e.g. SCSI drives). Firmware differences make more sense and are used. RAID drives seem to have tighter time-bounds on how long they will try to recover from errors. With RAID systems, you'd rather a timely failure than a faintly increased chance of success. See the description of TLER and RAFF here: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=399 The equivallent desktop drive appears to be: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=301 It doesn't have MTBF specs (when did that stop being specified?). Those numbers are not very convincing anyway (remember the DeathStars?). The specs on how many times the drive can be started and stopped are identical. I have no inside knowledge. These are just impressions/guesses.
