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"When a 5-drive backplane went down, we had 5 drives go offline. Now if a connector goes down, only 1 drive will go offline."

Wouldn't a backplane be more analogous to a SATA card than a single connector? In which case, 40 drives will go down on failure.

Neat stuff though. Would be fun to build one.

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The former model still had SATA cards that the backplanes connected to. I think the biggest win for them is the fact that the backplanes were one of the more error prone pieces in the box.

On a side note, each of the new SATA cards can support up to 40 drives, but there are only 45 drives in the pod, so one failing would presumably take out 22-23 drives instead of 40. Still worse than losing 5 drives though.

They still had 3 PCI cards before, as well as the multipliers, so card failure is not much different. But port multipliers are all all the same bus, so more error prone.

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