Swapable Drives on Powermac- Why it's a good idea
I'll put this in as my one and only prediction/suggestion before macworld...
Swapable drives a la Xserve would be a good idea on new powermacs because...
1. Hard drives are archaic pieces of crap that must eventually fail and yet most people trust them with their very lives and backing up is still considered a third party issue.
2. Changing drives (setting jumpers, connecting cables, power) is still beyond the technical skills of a lot of users and Apple could cash in on technophobes ordering drive modules.
3. With 2 bays (hopefully 3) and OS X's raid capabilities Apple could bring "crash proof" to the prosumer.
I envision someone sitting in front of their powermac and OSX alerts them that their #3 drive has failed, asks if they want to eject it, and opens a link to the apple store to buy another one.
That would be slick! Of course, being a cheap bastard, I'd replace the drive in the module myself anyway.
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I am NORDSTROdamus, not that other guy.
[ 06-11-2002: Message edited by: Nordstrodamus ]</p>
Swapable drives a la Xserve would be a good idea on new powermacs because...
1. Hard drives are archaic pieces of crap that must eventually fail and yet most people trust them with their very lives and backing up is still considered a third party issue.
2. Changing drives (setting jumpers, connecting cables, power) is still beyond the technical skills of a lot of users and Apple could cash in on technophobes ordering drive modules.
3. With 2 bays (hopefully 3) and OS X's raid capabilities Apple could bring "crash proof" to the prosumer.
I envision someone sitting in front of their powermac and OSX alerts them that their #3 drive has failed, asks if they want to eject it, and opens a link to the apple store to buy another one.
That would be slick! Of course, being a cheap bastard, I'd replace the drive in the module myself anyway.
--
I am NORDSTROdamus, not that other guy.
[ 06-11-2002: Message edited by: Nordstrodamus ]</p>
Comments
I would love to have hot-swap bays on the front. But I don't think Apple would do it. I hope they do
???? <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" /> <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" /> <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" /> <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" /> ????
[quote] I'd replace the drive in the module myself anyway. <hr></blockquote>
So would everyone else in the world.
I've never had a hard drive fail on me, and I've never even heard of a Mac HD just dying one day. There is CD/DVD burning in the finder.... thats not 3rd party! Internal RAID would be nice as a BTO feature, but I can see no reason why a Prosumer would want it.
Pres
<strong>
So would everyone else in the world. [Replace their own hard drives].</strong><hr></blockquote>
I was sort of the default IT guy for an entire department full of PhDs and 90% of them wouldn't change out a hard drive, install an airport card, or even put in ram out of fear of messing things up. I really don't think you can overestimate the need for simplicity with computers.
[quote]<strong>
I've never had a hard drive fail on me, and I've never even heard of a Mac HD just dying one day. There is CD/DVD burning in the finder.... thats not 3rd party! Internal RAID would be nice as a BTO feature, but I can see no reason why a Prosumer would want it.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
I have changed out maybe ten failed hard drives in total for a department with some 70 or so computers. Trust me, hard drives fail quite a lot. As for the CD/DVD burning it's still an optional procedure and falls far short of the kind of systemic redundancy necessary to recover from failures with minimal fuss. I don't know how many times I've had to explain to someone that even though they backed up their docs, they still have to go through the pain in the ass process of reinstalling applications because they didn't back up their prefs (Library now). And witness the existense of aps like carbon cloner that exist for the very reason that simply drag and dropping your system folder onto a DVD will not grab all the invisible files necessary for it to work.
And yes, drives are about the most archaic peices of machinery in a computer (excluding the fan and floppies in PCs). When solid state alternatives arrive in the next few years people will view the hard drive in much the same way we view the tape and reel now.
<strong>
So would everyone else in the world.
I've never had a hard drive fail on me, and I've never even heard of a Mac HD just dying one day. There is CD/DVD burning in the finder.... thats not 3rd party! Internal RAID would be nice as a BTO feature, but I can see no reason why a Prosumer would want it.
Pres</strong><hr></blockquote>
Boy are you lucky! I've had 5 drives fail on me so far. The most recent one the is drive in my PowerBook G3 (wallstreet) that died three weeks ago.
Remember -- the question is not will your hard drive fail, but rather when will it fail.
As to who would want an Internal RAID -- just about everyone. It really speeds up program loading, saving files, etc, and now that HDs are so cheap it makes a lot of sense to use one. I wouldn't buy a PC motherboard that didn't have built it RAID. It would really be great if Apple would make it a standard feature.
- You can't mix up RAID 0 and RAID 1, unless you use 0+1, which will require 4 drives!
- If you are touting the automatic backup of mirrored RAID, then you will have most consumers complaining (and calling AppleCare) that their machine has 2 60GB drives, yet the Finder says they only have 60GB of capacity and therefore one of the drives must be defective.
- Hot-swap drives are expensive, and largely proprietary tech. (for the drive carriers). Most people would not want/need it and would resent paying the premium for it.
- For people/companies that have invested in an Xserve, it is completely unnecessary. If everyone's Home account is on the server, which already has the hot-swap and RAID options, then you have no need for it.
- If not set up in RAID, hot-swap drives can be a big problem when a kid comes along and gives a tug on the handle of the drive and unplugs it when everything is running, likely causing data curruption and loss.
- The cost involved in sending your machine in to a shop to have a drive replaced would barely (if at all) be more expensive than buying a replacement hot-swap drive, and the amount of time involved wouldn't be that much more, seeing as people wouldn't usually have an extra hot-swap drive kicking around in their drawer just in case one of their drives fails.
I think if you see it, you would see a single hot-swap bay, but I don't think you will, seeing as all the benefits of that are probably already available with an external Firewire HD.
A swappable solution like the XServe's would be bad for the Powermacs. Who want's to pay $500 for a HD from Apple when you can buy the same thing for $150 and install it yourself? That's what a Powermac is about, installing drives yourself. And that's why the Powermac's case is so easy to open, and the HDs are so easy to access. I installed a second HD in my computer and it took me 15 minutes from cracking the case to booting up.
Besides, the price of the drives will go down if they use them in more than one product.
<strong>People already pay a premium for a PowerMac, might as well add some more value to that premium. The high end P-Mac price is lower now than it has traditionally been. Adding the hot swap drives would allow apple to up the price again, especially if the mother board had seperate controllers for each drive.
Besides, the price of the drives will go down if they use them in more than one product.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Only the price wouldn't go down because they'd have a monopoly on them and could get away with charging more. They'd probably even do what they did with the Xserve and not sell the carriers separately. That's fine for a server (especially for service contracts, where you can guarantee that the drive itself is compatible), but is purely a cash-grab on a tower, and would make a lot of people really mad.
Originally posted by naepstn:
<strong>
- You can't mix up RAID 0 and RAID 1, unless you use 0+1, which will require 4 drives!</strong><hr></blockquote>
Although OSX only does 0 & 1 I'm pretty sure that RAID 3 & 5 require only 3 drives. I assume Xserve's software allows for this since it has 4 drives, but don't know for sure.
<strong>
- If you are touting the automatic backup of mirrored RAID, then you will have most consumers complaining (and calling AppleCare) that their machine has 2 60GB drives, yet the Finder says they only have 60GB of capacity and therefore one of the drives must be defective.</strong>
As long as it's BTO, I think most people will know what their buying and I think Apple could make a simple enough setup to explain the options.
<strong>
- Hot-swap drives are expensive, and largely proprietary tech. (for the drive carriers). Most people would not want/need it and would resent paying the premium for it.</strong>[/QUOTE]
Sure enough Apples swap drives are expensive, but are you saying that the technology is fundamentally much more expensive or Apple is just milking us? I expect them to be a little more expensive, but attributed the big expense to Apple (consider the cost of ram from them!).
<strong>
- If not set up in RAID, hot-swap drives can be a big problem when a kid comes along and gives a tug on the handle of the drive and unplugs it when everything is running, likely causing data curruption and loss.</strong>[/QUOTE]
I think apple would have to make drive ejection something controlled by the system (just like the other drives) to prevent this (and outright stealing).
<strong>
- The cost involved in sending your machine in to a shop to have a drive replaced would barely (if at all) be more expensive than buying a replacement hot-swap drive, and the amount of time involved wouldn't be that much more, seeing as people wouldn't usually have an extra hot-swap drive kicking around in their drawer just in case one of their drives fails.</strong>[/QUOTE]
For a mirrored setup the odds of the backup drive failing while the other one is being ordered would be small. And I think saving downtime is the most important thing.
If you are really stressed about this buy an XServe or better yet an external SCSI RAID tower (w/redundant power supply). If your data and time is valuable enough for all this jazz, you can afford it.
The only real benefit of hot-swap, and the reason it's used in servers is that you don't need to power down a machine in order to replace a drive. Any workstation can afford 10 minutes of downtime to replace a drive before it is powered back on.
Nordstrodamus,
As for RAID 5 in the Xserve, I actually don't think that it's supported. I don't think that it's possible with software RAID, but that you actually need a hardware RAID controller. (I believe that the parity bit calculation is too expensive in software to be feasible from a performance point of view) You are right about it only needing 3 drives min. though. I'd love to see a hardware RAID controller built into the next towers, but I don't think it'll happen because the Xserve doesn't have one.
Out of all the servers that we have running raid (10+) there are 9 running RAID5 and 1 running RAID1. Why? The likelyhood of getting data corruption when running RAID1 is VERY high when compared to the likelyhood of complete data corruption on a RAID5 setup. I should also point out that ALL of our RAID5 setups have a hot spare drive. When you spend $8,000 on hard drives for a RAID you aren't concerned about that extra $700.00 drive.
Bottom line...if someone needs a RAID setup they can do it with the CURRENT hardware with an add-in RAID card. If hot-swap capability is important then they shouldn't be running the G4...they should be running something with redundant power supplies, port-trunking NIC's, ECC memory, etc.
<strong>Anyone that knows what they are doing setting up a RAID is perfectly comfortable opening their case and swapping out an IDE drive. You don't need hot-swap at all.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes, but the idea is to make it easy for people not comfortable doing either.
As for the hot swapping, I'd agree that this might be overkill. I didn't mean to say hot-swap (did I say that?) I just meant easily swapable. I think the appeal is in the onboard redundancy and easy restoration of all vital system files and docs, not in hiccup free work.
[quote]<strong>
As for RAID 5 in the Xserve, I actually don't think that it's supported. ... I'd love to see a hardware RAID controller built into the next towers, but I don't think it'll happen because the Xserve doesn't have one.</strong><hr></blockquote>
If this is the case then my hopes are, indeed, dimmed. I suppose it just might be that built in redundancy as a computer feature is sort of like fuel economy in choosing a new car for most people.
<strong>
As for the hot swapping, I'd agree that this might be overkill. I didn't mean to say hot-swap (did I say that?) I just meant easily swapable. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Easily swappable? I installed a new hard drive in 1 minute.
~2 seconds to open my comp.(quicksilver G4)
~10 seconds to find the cable I need to use
~15 seconds to plug the cables in
~30 seconds staring at the machine, wondering if it was really that simple.
~1 second to power on my computer.
~2 seconds to close my comp.
(then I had to format it, but you have to do that no matter what.)
If you want something EASIER than that, you are insane.