I love reading storagemojo.com and got some incredible insights over the years but now I am a little grumpy. Sun’s Amber Road with the fishworks framework was long expected and many people were extremely curious about this potential netapp replacement. I watched the videos when it was released in december and must say that I have not seen anything as exciting for a long time. So I was curious what you had to say about it and checked every few days but surprisingly I did not see anything on storagemojo. Now you are suggesting that they have 15K drives which shows that you have read nada about this product. Their tiered storage concept involves a ZFS modification to allow tiering from 128GB DRAM to up to 600 GB flash to 7200 RPM disks. Apparently this product does not need any faster drives, Sun even considers ditching the 7200 disks in favor of 4200 RPM disks to save power and does not expect a huge performance hit.
I would still be interested to read your opinion on the Sun Storage 7000 series.

Of course what this does prove is just how finely balanced disk drives are in a mechanical sense. That’s the wonder, and also the weakness of them. I’m assuming that what happened here is that no data corruption occured and that the drives stop writing when they sense the head moving too far off the data track and what we are actually seeing is a delay put in by the firmware to allow the vibration to dampen down. If this sort of event caused data corruption then that would be far more serious than a glitch in I/O.