trs80 asked (in a comment on this entry) about my views on various aspects of modern disk drives. This is actually an interesting subject for me because things are happening in the disk drive world that I hadn't been aware of until recently.

The big change that had passed me by entirely is the shift away from regular sized 3.5" hard drives to 2.5" (aka Small Form Factor) drives, what used to be 'laptop drives'. I'm used to thinking of these as things you wouldn't use outside of laptops but this is not at all the case any more. There are any number of 7200 RPM drives that will run happily in 24x7 setups, have long warranty periods, and apparently don't cost huge amounts of money over 3.5" drives of the same size. Using 2.5" drives is quite attractive in general because you get more drives into the same space and you can put SSDs in your drive bays without hassles (all SSDs that I've ever seen are 2.5" drives).

The bad news is that unfortunately we can't use them right now (although we'd like to). The largest 2.5" drives we've been able to spot are in the 1TB to 1.5TB range and this is just a bit too small for us. We're targeting 2TB drives in our hardware refresh as being a good balance between disk space and keeping our overall IOPS up (and also as being a decent size jump over our current set of drives).

This also means that we're targeting consumer level 7200 RPM SATA drives. I don't have any opinion on the relative merits of enterprise drives (whether 7200 RPM or faster) versus consumer drives because we've never had the money to buy anything but consumer drives. If money rained from the sky I think I'd still want to study the issue carefully because I'm far from convinced that 'enterprise' drives are worth the money, especially these days when you have much better options for high IO rates.

(After all a SSD will basically destroy even a 15k RPM hard drive. At that point you're down to 'higher reliability', if there is any.)

Money also dictates our limited use of SSDs. Today they are simply not price competitive for large storage; as trs80 mentioned they are something like 10x the per-GB cost of HDs (at least). They are excellent if you need the IO rates or if you have only modest storage needs (where the extra cost is small in absolute dollars), but this is not our space situation. We can only really afford to use SSDs as caches and write accelerators for regular (slow) hard drives. How much we'll be able to do this depends on how the budget comes out.

(We have already sprinkled SSDs over some important filesystems and we may do more of this, but we can't even vaguely afford to do it for everyone. And there is so far very little evidence that our users want and would be willing to pay for the drastically increased IO rates of an all-SSD ZFS pool.)