aitoribarra
Weaksauce
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2009
- Messages
- 92
BER = Bit Error Rate; density is not the problem so much as the BER staying static while density has been increasing. There's a risk, with all drives, that the data you wrote to the disk isn't the same as the data that comes off the disk, and that's why they have ECC etc to mitigate this. BER hasn't been improving inline with capacity, so on a large drive, there is a greater risk that some of your data is bad. And your OS may not notice. I guess better error detection and correction is expensive to implement; you need faster, more complex processors on the drives and/or filesystem-level protection (like ZFS or the stuff that's going into Vail). But generally SAS enterprise drives have BERs that are an order of magnitude better than SATA desktop stuff. You pays your money...
If all you've got on your drive is video, this doesn't matter - media players can cope with corrupt files. If it's something more important than that, then it's much more serious. Sure, backups are important, but having to restore from backup costs time and money, and you shouldn't have to do this just because your drive has unfit for purpose error correction. And what happens if you backup a corrupted file?
If all you've got on your drive is video, this doesn't matter - media players can cope with corrupt files. If it's something more important than that, then it's much more serious. Sure, backups are important, but having to restore from backup costs time and money, and you shouldn't have to do this just because your drive has unfit for purpose error correction. And what happens if you backup a corrupted file?