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StorageMojo's look at Bianca Schroeder of CMU's Parallel Data Lab paper Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?
Storage is very conservative, so don't expect overnight change, but these papers will accelerate the consumerization of large-scale storage. High-end drives still have advantages, but those fictive MTBFs aren't one of them anymore.By much different methodology I've come to the same conclusion for a big set of my data: forget RAID and replicate the data.
Further, these results validate the Google File System's central redundancy concept: forget RAID, just replicate the data three times. If I'm an IT architect, the idea that I can spend less money and get higher reliability from simple cluster storage file replication should be very attractive.