Being a storage admin, when you start to have gobs of hard drives, there's always one failing. You'll have dry spells where nothing fails, and then all of a sudden you're looking at 2,3+ failures on a system, although not necessarily on the same RAID group.

If your hardware provider needs to cut down on the warranties to be financially sustainable, I'd be concerned. It looks like these are rentals and not purchases, so why wouldn't these guys be warrantying to Dell/HP or the drive manufacturer directly? Are they buying gray market to reduce the cost, trying to pass that savings off to you, but then in turn run out of recourse when they need to replace a drive?

I'm just speculating; I have no idea if this company is good or not. I'm just concerned about the statement you made about the company, whether it's from your understanding or what they actually said.

Sorry, not being English my comment was maybe not really clear. They do not buy on the grey market (they are the largest hosting provider in Europe, 120k+ servers) but they carefully select the drives to have only the ones with the best reliability because the cannot afford to simply swap the drives of the dedicated servers to often as they operate on a low margin approach. They are not cutting down on guarantee, these are dedicated servers with guaranteed hardware, they change the drives in case of failure at no cost.

If you operate on low margin, you better have systems with minimal needs of manual operations, because as soon as you have one guy pulling a dedicated server, changing the drive and putting another one, you have lost a couple of months of your earnings on this particular server. If you do that too often, you are not happy at the end.

They're probably using SATA MLC drives. All their EC2 storage has been SATA so far, and its ridiculously difficult to get 1TB of SLC and remain cost effective.