[darkarmani]

> I think the calculation is replacing one drive takes about 15 minutes of work.

Is that really the true cost of replacement? I would think there is also the cost of dealing with the warranty and the testing and monitoring. Here is the quote from the blog post about unsuitable drives:

> When one drive goes bad, it takes a lot of work to get the RAID back on-line if the whole RAID is made up of unreliable drives. It’s just not worth the trouble.

I don't have the time to think about this fully, but it seems similar to calculating the present value of a future cash flow, because there are other costs beyond the first replacement effort:

> Their average age shows 0.8 years, but since these are warranty replacements, we believe that they are refurbished drives that were returned by other customers and erased, so they already had some usage when we got them.

It sounds like the total cost of a failed drive is actually 1.5x, because 50% of the replacement drives also fail.

[im3w1l]

You can probably cut the time for dealing with warranty down if you do it in bulk. They seem to have ~50 failing drives per month.