Safety Engineer, Dad, Husband, Pilot, Musician. Not necessarily in that order.

Ingenieur für funktionale Sicherheit, Vater, Ehemann, Pilot, Musiker. Nicht notwendigerweise in dieser Reihenfolge.

  • 23 Posts
  • 173 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • Then why do you think manufacturers still list these failure rates (to be sure, it is marked as a limit, not an actual rate)? I’m not being sarcastic or facetious, but genuinely curious. Do you know for certain that it doesn’t happen regularly? During a scrub, these are the kinds of errors that are quietly corrected (althouhg the scrub log would list them), as they are during normal operation (also logged).

    My theory is that they are being cautious and/or perhaps don’t have any high-confidence data that is more recent.


  • Bit error rates have barely improved since then. So the probability of an error whenr reading a substantial fraction of a disk is now higher than it was in 2013.

    But as others have pointed out. RAID is not, and never was, a substitute for a backup. Its purpose is to increase availability. And if that is critical to your enterprise, these things need to be taken into account, and it may turn out that raidz1 with 8 TB disks is fine for your application, or it may not. For private use, I wouldn’t fret. but make frequent backups.

    This article was not about total disk failure, but about the much more insidious undetected bit error.


  • Let’s do the math:

    The error-reate of modern hard disks is usually on the order of one undetectable error per 1E15 bits read, see for example the data sheet for the Seagate Exos 7E10. An 8 TB disk contains 6.4E13 (usable) bits, so when reading the whole disk you have roughly a 1 in 16 chance of an unrecoverable read error. Which is ok with zfs if all disks are working. The error-correction will detect and correct it. But during a resilver it can be a big problem.




  • It’s a trap. If the House changes the bill, it has to pass through the Senate again, which is not guaranteed. This talk is intended to distract from the Discharge Petition that was initiated by a Democrat to approve the Senate’s bill. The hardliner Republicans, first and foremost Mike Johnson, have made it crystal clear through their actions that they have no intentions of helping Ukraine. The Democrats built golden bridges by agreeing to border security measures which many of them find abhorrent, and by agreeing to combine it with help for Israel, which some Democrats also don’t like at the moment. And still Johnson flatly refused to even consider it.

    Speaker Johnson says the right things (“No one wants Vladimir Putin to prevail. I’m of the opinion that he wouldn’t stop at Ukraine … and go all through the way through Europe. There is a right and wrong there, a good versus evil in my view and Ukraine is the victim here”), but his actions speak louder with a very different message.






  • Saying it hasn’t been built in 30 years is a bit misleading. Although the base Il-76 airframes may be that old, the latest substantial avionics upgrade (designated A-50U) is less than 15 years old or so (first delivery in 2011), which isn’t too bad for military and aircraft systems. A lot of the E-3 equipment is older. That is not to say it is more capable than the E-3, it probably isn’t, but I’d say a fully functioning A-50U should not be underestimated. It’s even got toilets! Then again, it is also not clear to me that any “U” models are currently airworthy.






  • Yes. And unlike foot soldiers, and to some extent tank crews, pilots cannot be replaced in a few weeks, or even months, if you want them to be halfway competent in operating a complex weapons platform. Then again, given the number of pilots who have “accidentally” dropped munitions on Russian towns, “competent” seems to be relative. The alternative explanation is, of course, that the pilots knew what would likely happen over Ukraine, and did the prudent thing, “losing” their ordnance before flying into range of Ukrainian air defence, and then returning safely to base.