[Discuss] Advanced Format hard drives

[Richard Pieri]

On Jun 17, 2011, at 3:27 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> 
> Anyone ran into problems using such a drive with Linux? Enough so that
> you'd avoid such drives?

Yes, although the problem had to do with these being desktop class drives rather than being AF drives.

In a nutshell, these drives will go into the power saving state as one would expect.  Waking from this state takes longer than any sane RAID system, hardware or software, will wait, resulting in the disks being marked as faulted.  Now imagine 600 of these disks in mirrored pairs across a 300-node compute cluster, faulting left, right and center.  It was not pretty.

Hilarity, as they say, ensued.

--Rich P.