Commonly, one thinks of enterprise grade hardware as more reliable and overall more robust to failures than off the shelf equipment. Apparently, as far as hard drives are concerned, this is simply false! I came across this proceedings article of the “5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies”. It’s quite a long read, so for the roundup you better read this. Or even shorter: there is no difference between the reliability of SATA, SCSI and FC drives. Anyhow, consider that this analysis takes nothing but the mean time to failure into account. Neither the performance nor the guarantee options, which of course can differ dramatically. Anyway, this is not the point on which the report wants to focus. It emphasizes the fact that a broken disk has to be replaced without regard to its type and that the overall time spent on replacing erroneous hardware can be calculated independently. As a consequence, this gives the cheaper mass market SATA drives a strong stand in large installations (where the number of drives attached to the controlling entity eradicates the performance difference between the single SATA and FC drives).