[Cialug] Google Hard Drive Study

[kristau]

On 3/8/07, Nathan Stien <nathanism at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Granted.
>
> But if the case has no merit and you have deep enough pockets to
> actually go to court, you can win.  And if you win, you can countersue
> to recover your court costs.  And everyone knows Google has deep
> pockets.

Tactically, Google could probably easily handle such a lawsuit, but
the resulting damage to their working relationship with the various
hardware manufacturers involved would be irreparable.

Remember, Google's hardware model is based on massive amounts of cheap
hardware configured to be massively parallel and redundant.  Crappy
hardware actually helped them build a better infrastructure by forcing
them to consider what happens when drives, RAM, motherboards and
processors are crapping out left, right and center.

Under that model, it is more important for them to keep a good
relationship with all manufacturers, regardless of quality issues, so
they can get the best price today on those 300 or so drives that
failed.  Whether withholding that info violates their "do no evil"
policy or not is another topic for discussion which depends highly on
your point of view.

-- 
Tired programmer
Coding late into the night
The core dump follows

My GNUPG public key is available at http://www.kristau.net/public_key.asc