[NTLUG:Discuss] Which filesystem & partitioning for a 9Terabyte volume?

[Ralph Green]

Howdy,
  Did you read the article at http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162
that I referred to?  
  The problem is that drive reliability rates are staying about the same
and drive sizes are growing to the point where a RAID array has enough
bits in it that the likelihood of an unrecoverable error during a RAID
rebuild grows to a good chance of happening.  With small arrays, it is
still possible, but much less likely.
Good day,
Ralph

On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 11:17 -0600, Leroy Tennison wrote:
> I don't understand something about a statement you made: Given the size 
> drives we have today, a single drive failure could cause a RAID-5 to not 
> be recoverable.
> 
> My understanding is that given N drives (where N must be at least 3) you 
>   "consume" the equivalent of one drive spreading the redundancy data 
> across all drives.  Assuming all drives are equal size, how is losing a 
> small drive recoverable but losing a big drive not?