On Sat, 2013-07-06 at 03:36 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

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hot/warm/cold spares in the chassis.
  This simply degrades performance.

Why should it? If the spare is unused?

The answer is rather obvious.  If spares are in the chassis one has
fewer active array spindles.

Sorry... still don't get it...
When you have another drive in the chassis... which is not actively used
by the RAID, but just waiting as a hot spare for a failing device and
rebuild becoming necessary...
Apart from power consumption and more heat... how should that affect the
read/write performance of the RAID?

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Sure about that? Wasn't there some agreement that HGST belongs to WD but
produces independently...?

That wouldn't make sense for either party.  Where did you read this?

I vaguely remember this being part for some anti trust obligations...

Got a link?

The only thing I've found right now was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST#History
"It was agreed that WD would operate with WD Technologies and HGST as
wholly owned subsidiaries and they would compete in the marketplace with
separate brands and product lines."
But the next sentence about Toshiba may indicate that HGST stops 3.5"
business?!

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and Toshiba got something from the
WD/HGST trade and already announced a 3.5" enterprise disk out of that.

Toshiba has been producing 3.5" enterprise drives for years.  Got a link
showing that Toshiba received technology from the WD/Hitachi acquisition?

Again, see Wikipedia.

I already stated many of them.  You don't seem to be following along
very well.

Well you only named one may need to use partitions (which I do not see
why this should be a disadvantage)... and that in few years... there
might be only some vendors left and (by then) the idea wouldn't work
anymore; but even if that would happen, that's still no reason for not
doing it now?
Anything else I've missed or didn't understand as a disadvantage?


Cheers,
Chris.