disk, disk, disk

I started adding 165 TB of disk to one of our clusters today. This is what that looks like – 55 three TB disks:

The packaging was not too great; while all disks were well packaged individually, the big boxes that contained the individual drive boxes were flimsy. As a consequence, one of the disks got rather damaged (the one on the right):

I don’t know what it got hit with, but it must have been a pretty serious blow. The aluminium enclosure of the drive is severely dented and even cracked; the white line in the image below is an actual crack in the metal:

Back in October 2009 I added 130 TB of disk to another cluster, which looked like this, prior to install:

That was 65 times WD2002FYPS.

So this time around – almost 18 months later – we get 27% more capacity using 15% fewer drives. Got to love the computer industry and the progress it makes.