We ship voice recording and conferencing appliances based on Supermicro hardware, a RAID controller and 4x disks on RAID 10.
We tried to mitigate the failure interval on the drives by mixing brands. Our Supermicro distributor tried to really dissuade us from using mixed batches and brands of SAS drives in our servers. Really had to dig in our heels to get them to listen.
Even when you buy a NAS fully loaded like a Synology it comes with the same brand, model and batch of drives. In one case we saw 6 drive failures in two months for the same Synology NAS.
Wonder whether NetApp or EMC try mixing brands or at least batches on the appliances they ship?
I can tell you that EMC and IBM both use the same drives from the same batch in an entire system of tens to hundreds of drives and while I don't know about all cases completely I did oversee a large number of systems and drives and there was never a double disk failure we had that completely took two drives. With a proper background media scan procedure you also reduce the risk of a media problem in two different drives.
Ofcourse, the SSDs we use are properly vetted for design issues and bugs in the firmware actually get fixed for us in a relatively timely manner. You get that level of service with the associated large volume.
We tried to mitigate the failure interval on the drives by mixing brands. Our Supermicro distributor tried to really dissuade us from using mixed batches and brands of SAS drives in our servers. Really had to dig in our heels to get them to listen.
Even when you buy a NAS fully loaded like a Synology it comes with the same brand, model and batch of drives. In one case we saw 6 drive failures in two months for the same Synology NAS.
Wonder whether NetApp or EMC try mixing brands or at least batches on the appliances they ship?