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FYI Samsung only makes SSDs at this point. They sold off their HDD business to Seagate at the end of 2011: https://www.seagate.com/about-...

"SSD is dependent on firmware and susceptible to software based complete failure, an HDD ain't."

What the fuck kind of crack are you smoking? http://knowledge.seagate.com/a...

"HDD on the other hand is susceptible to vibration damage, while an SSD ain't."

Hi, my name is ultrasonics, a form of very rapid vibration. I'll make your puny glass chips turn into fucking dust at the right frequency.

At least for hard disk drives, what happened to just using the low level tools?
Historically it was dead easy to run them from DOS. Still looks like it's possible, e.g. with Seagate it's an .iso file that is distributed.

See there, page 6/20, section G. : (an emphasis added)
http://www.seagate.com/files/s...

Seagate is not responsible for lost user data. Erase Drive is available for Seagate or Maxtor drives only.
Five choices are available under this section:
  Secure Erase. This method uses the drive firmware to erase the data by overwriting the data
with zeros. In Enhanced Erase mode, all previously written user data shall be overwritten,
including sectors that are no longer in use due to reallocation. Secure Erase requires a user
password to run which is deleted at the conclusion of the procedure. If your drive does not have
a user password, SeaTools for DOS will set a temporary password "idrive" without the quotes.
This password will be removed at the end of the Secure Erase so you never need to actually use
it to access your drive. If ... BLAH BLAH BLAH

No idea if you have a UEFI computer, maybe you need to use BIOS emulation, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't because you lack BIOS emulation etc.
But then, they've got a Windows version as well. The pdf for that is harder to read says it's from October 2015. It has a changelog.
It's more terse but says stuff like :
http://www.seagate.com/files/w...

- SED Crypto Erase
Self-Encrypting Drive Instant Secure Erase. If the drive supports hardware
encryption, this menu will be displayed. Like Full Erase this command will permanently destroy
access to all user data on the drive, but will do so by the erasure of the drive encryption key which
takes less than one minute to complete. Both SAS and SATA drives are supported, but the boot
drive should not be listed as an available choice.

- Sanitize Erase
Write zeros to all user data sectors on the SATA drive including unallocated and
cache sectors. This command is mostly found on SSD drives

Failing vendor tools, see what the FLOSS punks have
https://tinyapps.org/docs/wipe...

So, a quote, with a bolding on what I thought was fun.

Explanation

According to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-88: Guidelines for Media Sanitization, Secure Erase is "An overwrite technology using firmware based process to overwrite a hard drive. Is a drive command defined in the ANSI ATA and SCSI disk drive interface specifications, which runs inside drive hardware. It completes in about 1/8 the time of 5220 block erasure." The guidelines also state that "degaussing and executing the firmware Secure Erase command (for ATA drives only) are acceptable methods for purging."
Benefits

        Can securely wipe most PATA/SATA hard drives manufactured this century
        Reportedly restores peak performance to SSD drives (though SE fails to securely wipe some SSDs) [hummm...]
        hdparm/Linux offers much better hardware support than HDDErase/MS-DOS
Overwrites blocks marked as bad by the hard drive (which DBAN and similar tools ignore)
        Though speed (vs. block erase wiping tools like DBAN) is often cited, the difference is negligible.*

At least for hard disk drives, what happened to just using the low level tools?
Historically it was dead easy to run them from DOS. Still looks like it's possible, e.g. with Seagate it's an .iso file that is distributed.

See there, page 6/20, section G. : (an emphasis added)
http://www.seagate.com/files/s...

Seagate is not responsible for lost user data. Erase Drive is available for Seagate or Maxtor drives only.
Five choices are available under this section:
  Secure Erase. This method uses the drive firmware to erase the data by overwriting the data
with zeros. In Enhanced Erase mode, all previously written user data shall be overwritten,
including sectors that are no longer in use due to reallocation. Secure Erase requires a user
password to run which is deleted at the conclusion of the procedure. If your drive does not have
a user password, SeaTools for DOS will set a temporary password "idrive" without the quotes.
This password will be removed at the end of the Secure Erase so you never need to actually use
it to access your drive. If ... BLAH BLAH BLAH

No idea if you have a UEFI computer, maybe you need to use BIOS emulation, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't because you lack BIOS emulation etc.
But then, they've got a Windows version as well. The pdf for that is harder to read says it's from October 2015. It has a changelog.
It's more terse but says stuff like :
http://www.seagate.com/files/w...

- SED Crypto Erase
Self-Encrypting Drive Instant Secure Erase. If the drive supports hardware
encryption, this menu will be displayed. Like Full Erase this command will permanently destroy
access to all user data on the drive, but will do so by the erasure of the drive encryption key which
takes less than one minute to complete. Both SAS and SATA drives are supported, but the boot
drive should not be listed as an available choice.

- Sanitize Erase
Write zeros to all user data sectors on the SATA drive including unallocated and
cache sectors. This command is mostly found on SSD drives

Failing vendor tools, see what the FLOSS punks have
https://tinyapps.org/docs/wipe...

So, a quote, with a bolding on what I thought was fun.

Explanation

According to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-88: Guidelines for Media Sanitization, Secure Erase is "An overwrite technology using firmware based process to overwrite a hard drive. Is a drive command defined in the ANSI ATA and SCSI disk drive interface specifications, which runs inside drive hardware. It completes in about 1/8 the time of 5220 block erasure." The guidelines also state that "degaussing and executing the firmware Secure Erase command (for ATA drives only) are acceptable methods for purging."
Benefits

        Can securely wipe most PATA/SATA hard drives manufactured this century
        Reportedly restores peak performance to SSD drives (though SE fails to securely wipe some SSDs) [hummm...]
        hdparm/Linux offers much better hardware support than HDDErase/MS-DOS
Overwrites blocks marked as bad by the hard drive (which DBAN and similar tools ignore)
        Though speed (vs. block erase wiping tools like DBAN) is often cited, the difference is negligible.*

It depends on the capacity, generally the lower capacity ones will have fewer platters or even a single head
(pdf) 250GB-3TB: 500-1TB per disk, 1-3 disks

(pdf) 3TB-8TB: 1.3TB per disk, 3-6 disks

So a cheap 1TB drive may have a single platter, but they add more as needed.

It depends on the capacity, generally the lower capacity ones will have fewer platters or even a single head
(pdf) 250GB-3TB: 500-1TB per disk, 1-3 disks

(pdf) 3TB-8TB: 1.3TB per disk, 3-6 disks

So a cheap 1TB drive may have a single platter, but they add more as needed.

I just wait for someone to start selling "your new, own personal cloud to put in your home!!" devices.

Like this?
Or this?
Or maybe this?

There's a difference between powered hours and total expected lifetime. These drives have a two year warranty, so they're betting that it will last for at least 1,200 powered up hours per year, or about 3 hours a day.

Apparently Seagate meant 2400h per year, i.e. typical office usage, in contrast to 24x7. See here: http://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/_cross-product/en-us/docs/7200rpm-drive-spec-mb578-7-1201us.pdf

For the exact opposite, check out the Seagate Barracuda Data Sheet. Scroll down to where they're rated for 2,400 power-on hours. In other words, they're built to survive a whopping 3 months in a NAS.

If you're buying something to stick in your gaming computer, read the performance specs. If you actually care about the data you're writing, the reliability numbers are way more interesting.

Look at the AFR on the data sheet. It's less than 1%. So, obviously the MTBF is not 2400 hours. It's >875,000 hours. An MTBF of 2400 hours translates to an AFR of 97.4%, which is obviously not going to fare very well in a prototype lab, not to mention the marketplace.

There were no mentions of reliability metrics

...which is the only reason I'd care to read such an article. I have a Synology 4-bay NAS filled with drives for home stuff. Although it's not critical data and I have the most important folders backed up to Amazon Glacier, several TB of data is tied up in rips of our CD and DVD collection. While I could re-rip everything, the first effort took weeks and I'd strongly prefer not to have to again.

So for my specific application, I don't care a lot about raw performance because everything's going through a 1Gb switch anyway. However, this thing runs 24/7 and I'd like a reasonably warm fuzzy feeling that I'm not likely to have two drives fail simultaneously. NAS drives (I've bought WD Red most recently) are specced for exactly that environment and have things like anti-vibration mechanisms to make them less likely to spontaneously explode. For the exact opposite, check out the Seagate Barracuda Data Sheet. Scroll down to where they're rated for 2,400 power-on hours. In other words, they're built to survive a whopping 3 months in a NAS.

If you're buying something to stick in your gaming computer, read the performance specs. If you actually care about the data you're writing, the reliability numbers are way more interesting.

The average read/write seek time of this drive is 12ms. That seems quite usable to me for multiple use cases.

reference: http://www.seagate.com/www-con...

The average read/write speed of this drive is 150MB/sec with a maximum sustained read rate of 190MB/sec. See http://www.seagate.com/files/w...

Assuming only the average read/write rate it would take 14 hours and 48 minutes to simultaneously read from one drive and write to another.
8*1000*1000/150/60/60=14.81 hours

Counter-example: Buy a new hard drive direct from Seagate

Granted, the prices are all MSRP, so as to not alienate Best Buy/etc. There's no incentive to buy from them, but the option is there.

Dell and HP also have online stores. In fact, I've found it to be EXTREMELY rare for anything in tech to have a corporate site, and not have the option of buying it from them directly. Few things are more infuriating than when I'm at the manufacturer's page, decide to buy a product, and it says "This item is available from these fine retailers." It's even worse, since said retailers never have the part in stock.

Whoa, the summary is orders magnitude off on the density. (or the drive is way bigger than an aircraft carrier.)

So is the info in the forwarded Computerworld article. As this is a first gen HAMR drive, the density is actually 1 terabit per square inch.

Nah. Seagate has a habit of introducing solid new model, and after few months (up to a year) quietly CHANGING the design.
ST2000DM001 for example comes in three varieties
(2/4) or (3/5 [800~GB/platter]) or (3/6 [667~GB/platter]))

2TB Barracuda ST2000DM001 can be found at random in a range of platter configurations - the 'perfect' two-platter version or two different three-platter models, which are slower and might also be less reliable. If you have an ST2000DM001 that weighs more than 600 grams, has a shallow (as opposed to deep and wide) depression on the cover (like this), and HD Tune reports a maximum read transfer rate of less than 190MB/s, you have a three-platter unit, and you may want to consider getting a refund.

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/...

> Is the harddrive running open-source firmware too?

A disingenuous double attack.

First: "Since I can't be perfect, why should I make any effort at all?"

The article says:

The free software operating system preloaded on the refurbished X60 is Trisquel GNU/Linux, the Ubuntu derivative backed by the FSF that ships without any proprietary software or firmware options.

So tell me again who is being disingenous?

Second: "FSF is has compromised! that makes them insincere"

The answer is that no, the hd firmware isn't open. Like the firmware of a microwave or common wristwatch, it's probably impossible to put new firmware on it, and it's probably not a problem.

A line has to be drawn somewhere, so FSF's line is: if the software (including firmware) can be updated, it must be free. The philosophy is that if it's complex or important, then the vendor will create a way to update the firmware. If the firmware can't be updated, then the code is probably sufficiently mundane as to be ignored, just as circuits are ignored.

Why say it has "no proprietary firmware" when it clearly does?

Firmware is available for many (most?) hard drives. I'm not sure why that makes it difference -- if that particular laptop didn't allow BIOS updates, would it be ok to advertise it as not having proprietary firmware? Is it somehow better that not only is the firmware no accessible in the hard drive, but the entire API is secret so you have no idea what it's doing? Maybe it scans the hard drive at night looking for your secret data and it uses its DMA access to poke that data into operating system TCP buffers. Any device with DMA access can be a security threat.

And why do you keep saying probably? If there's a chance that proprietary firmware could be a problem, then shouldn't they tell me that?

Switching to SSD actually cuts heat, for example

Every time I compare SSD to HD, I don't see the power saving GB for GB unless you are talking trivial amounts of GB.

For example, Intel P3700 series SSD (2 TB max size) has a power consumption of 25 watts writing and 10 watts idle. Look at the collossal heat sink on that thing.

A Seagate ES.3 7200 rpm 2 TB SAS enterprise HD has a power consumption of 10 watts random read and 6 watts idle. Considering that the 4 TB model doesn't take much more power than that, the comparison for substantial storage sizes favors the HD even more.

Yeah, if you built an HD array to try to come close to the performance of that rip roaring SSD, the latter would come out ahead on power, but GB for GB it is actually a loser on power.

I got the warranty info directly from WD's site and spec sheets. RPM is NOT the primary factor in determining seek time, that only affects rotational latency, which is one of at least 4 components of access time, the other three being track seek time, head settling time, and head select time. Seek time is generally the largest of those, rotational latency second largest, and the others are minor by comparison.

Amount of ECC is not only dependent upon 512/4k (AF) drive, that's one factor, but most "enterprise" drives from most manufacturers have greater ECC and most use lower track densities to allow faster positioning (faster seek). For instance, compare the data sheets for the 7200RPM desktop and Enterprise (Constellation ES) drives from Seagate. Note the "enhanced error correction" and better "non-recoverable read error" rates (which are directly related to ECC recoverablity) on the ES (enterprise) drive, and that's comparing a 512b sector ES drive to a 4K/AF desktop drive.

As I said, you analysis was generally good, you just missed a the 3 items I noted.

I got the warranty info directly from WD's site and spec sheets. RPM is NOT the primary factor in determining seek time, that only affects rotational latency, which is one of at least 4 components of access time, the other three being track seek time, head settling time, and head select time. Seek time is generally the largest of those, rotational latency second largest, and the others are minor by comparison.

Amount of ECC is not only dependent upon 512/4k (AF) drive, that's one factor, but most "enterprise" drives from most manufacturers have greater ECC and most use lower track densities to allow faster positioning (faster seek). For instance, compare the data sheets for the 7200RPM desktop and Enterprise (Constellation ES) drives from Seagate. Note the "enhanced error correction" and better "non-recoverable read error" rates (which are directly related to ECC recoverablity) on the ES (enterprise) drive, and that's comparing a 512b sector ES drive to a 4K/AF desktop drive.

As I said, you analysis was generally good, you just missed a the 3 items I noted.

Seagate is claiming 400 Gs maximum operating shock. I, um, gee, well truthfully I have no idea what that means in practical terms but it seems like a big number to me.

A 100G impact will turn a human being into a collection of loosely assembled parts with an infinitesimal chance for restoration to correct function.

A 400G impact will turn a human being into goo.

...because of surface-to-volume and scaling considerations, the smaller these things get, the less fragile they get. I dropped my iPod Mini (rotating drive) at least as often as I dropped my current flash-memory iPod and never had a problem. Yes, battery life is an issue. Quite possibly, service life might be an issue (bearing wear).

Seagate is claiming 400 Gs maximum operating shock. I, um, gee, well truthfully I have no idea what that means in practical terms but it seems like a big number to me. They are claiming 80 Gs for the first desktop drive I looked at.

Seagate makes SSDs too, ya know.
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/laptop-600-ssd/

> What interests me is that if SSDs mount a major invasion of server-rooms and data-centers worldwide it also means that we will now finally start to see SSD pricing drop like rock.

I'd think the opposite may occur. SSD flash is currently limited by the amount we can produce at a reasonable price.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240181971/NAND-shortage-could-slow-pace-of-flash-price-drops-squeeze-SSD-makers
http://www.seagate.com/point-of-view/nand-flash-supply-market-master-pov/

Learn to read:
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/laptop-600-ssd/#

"What do you get?
-SATA 6Gb/s interface
-Up to 400GB capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor with 7mm or 5mm z-heights
-Comprehensive portfolio from a trusted storage-industry leader
-Limited 3 year, usage-based warranty"

Guess what "Limited 3 year, usage-based warranty" means, you have hmm one guess.

And now the fun part :
Endurance (method 2: Total Bytes Written (TBW)) 72TB, 73TB 72TB 36.5TB

120GB model has 36TB endurance !!!!! I write about 2-5TB per month right now on my desktop :/

I just posted it above, but here it is again. Seagate's own published reliability information shows their 7200 RPM drives fail more than twice as often as either their 5400 RPM drives or their hybrid drives, and their SSDs are even more reliable.

Seagate's 5400 RPM and 5400 RPM hybrid drives fail annually at 0.48% and 0.50% respectively.
Their Pulsar SSD drives have an AFR of 0.44%
Their 7200 RPM 'enterprise value' drives have an AFR of 1.065%

I just posted it above, but here it is again. Seagate's own published reliability information shows their 7200 RPM drives fail more than twice as often as either their 5400 RPM drives or their hybrid drives, and their SSDs are even more reliable.

Seagate's 5400 RPM and 5400 RPM hybrid drives fail annually at 0.48% and 0.50% respectively.
Their Pulsar SSD drives have an AFR of 0.44%
Their 7200 RPM 'enterprise value' drives have an AFR of 1.065%

I just posted it above, but here it is again. Seagate's own published reliability information shows their 7200 RPM drives fail more than twice as often as either their 5400 RPM drives or their hybrid drives, and their SSDs are even more reliable.

Seagate's 5400 RPM and 5400 RPM hybrid drives fail annually at 0.48% and 0.50% respectively.
Their Pulsar SSD drives have an AFR of 0.44%
Their 7200 RPM 'enterprise value' drives have an AFR of 1.065%

And why are the magical unicorns going extinct? No demand. People on a budget buy a slow drive, people who can afford slightly more buy an SSD hybrid, people who have the means and require the performance buy an expensive SSD. If Seagate saw there was a market for expensive yet still slow 7,200 RPM drives, they'd keep making them. (Actually they still do have a few, it's their corporate customers who are too large and slow to make a more rational decision.)

Sorry I wasn't clear about the reliability thing. Seagate's 5,200 RPM drives have twice the reliability when compared to their 7,200 RPM drives (the Annual Failure Rate is predicted at 0.48%[1] vs 1.065%[2]), and the difference made by adding the complexity of a cache gives them a predicted AFR of only 0.50%. And reliability is absolutely driving this: if they have to double the reliability of their 7,200 RPM drives, they will cost more than plain old SSDs (also at 0.50% AFR[1]).

[1] http://origin-www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/
[2] http://origin-www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/hdd/enterprise-value-hdd/

And why are the magical unicorns going extinct? No demand. People on a budget buy a slow drive, people who can afford slightly more buy an SSD hybrid, people who have the means and require the performance buy an expensive SSD. If Seagate saw there was a market for expensive yet still slow 7,200 RPM drives, they'd keep making them. (Actually they still do have a few, it's their corporate customers who are too large and slow to make a more rational decision.)

Sorry I wasn't clear about the reliability thing. Seagate's 5,200 RPM drives have twice the reliability when compared to their 7,200 RPM drives (the Annual Failure Rate is predicted at 0.48%[1] vs 1.065%[2]), and the difference made by adding the complexity of a cache gives them a predicted AFR of only 0.50%. And reliability is absolutely driving this: if they have to double the reliability of their 7,200 RPM drives, they will cost more than plain old SSDs (also at 0.50% AFR[1]).

[1] http://origin-www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/
[2] http://origin-www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/hdd/enterprise-value-hdd/

I'm pretty sure you haven't actually seen that. In practice, what the HDD industry as a whole does is:

Well, actually I have. I got the company wrong, though -- it was Maxtor who used this definition. Quoting from the manual above:

KILOBYTE (K) - A unit of measure consisting of 1,024 (2^10) bytes
[...]
MEGABYTE (MB) - A unit of measurement consisting of 1,000 kilobytes or 1,024,000 bytes

You mean like one of these?

http://drive.seagate.com/content/samsung-en-us

as far as hd businesses go, they're effectively the same company in strategic partnership. for someone with a grudge it would certainly be enough.

the guy's a dimwit though, bragging about. no ethics - or style - at all.

Inside a container, they are mostly sealed, but as you said packs of Silica Gel, and --almost as good but much cheaper-- *rice* will absorb moisture almost as well as silica gel and is wildly cheaper. As you stated pull the hard disks, put them into the foam pack boxes that the drive manufacturers suggest, along with bubble wrap and silica gel. Ship the drives separately (air freight) if possible, with extra insurance, and back up all the data to DVD (or at least everything you consider irreplaceable). For the rest of the computer, pack peanut foam around the fans, and wrap everyhing else (the case) in plastic with silica gel packs inside. It would be best to remove all cards from the motherboard and wrap them separately in anti-static bags, then wrap that in bubble wrap and just keep it in the case of the computer. Heat isn't that big of an issue. 50 degrees celsius is perfectly fine for a (non-operating) computer. Most ship holds don't get above 35 C. The wiring insulation is good for 125 C, the aluminum is good for 660.3 C, any steel is good for about 1510 C. Plastics melt between 121 C and 255 C. Silicon has a melting point of 1,410 C (and within the chip there are aluminum interconnects and that melts as previously stated at 660.3 C. The chip manufacturers only put upper storage limits of 85 C however. Because they are hermetically sealed, there is no problem with chips getting 'wet' (if you are unsure, read what hermetically means). Copper for wiring has a melting point of 1,085 C, so that shouldn't be a problem either. Clearly heat isn't an issue. Now vibration and shock and physical damage due to rough handling, or due to an insecure load (container rolling on the waves) could be an issue. If the boat is small, the waves will batter it. If the computer is 'loose' in the container, it will get pounded to pieces. Secure the computer. Make sure it can't move within the container, and nothing can bang into it. Pack it in a fashion that would make an Air Force LoadMaster proud. That is your biggest concern.

You're missing the ball here on several points :
* In the real world a Momentus XT 500 Gb will easily outperform a normal HDD. I have one, I can compare with identical machines running identical software. I'm sure that for users that limit their use to mail/browsing/media-playing the difference will be astounding. (**)
* For all I care, a 4-8Gb of Linux cache may be gigantically smarter than the one implemented by Seagate; in practice it's still connected to the pc/laptop by means of a (slow) network connection instead of a SATA connection.
* The bytes you store on the file-server are most likely going to be data, not programs etc. The hybrid disks aim at speeding up programs, not data.

I do agree that a 120-250Gb SSD will easily outperform the Momentus XT, but you'd have to trade in a lot of space for the extra speed and be willing to pay the higher price tag too.

(**: Personally I use way too much and too large programs to make even a fraction of it fit in the SSD cache but the effect is still noticeable)

PS: I had one of the drives that came with firmware SD 26 which (IMHO) had the cache completely disabled! (See my post on http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-Momentus/ANNOUNCEMENT-Firmware-SD28-Now-Available/td-p/122074/page/4 ) Only for that I should be advising everybody to NOT buy Seagate drives. Sadly though they are the only company to sell hybrid drives and I DO think the technology works as advertised.

Seagate and Samsung are forming a strategic alliance
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?name=seagate-completes-aquisition-samsungs-hdd-business-pr&vgnextoid=b201b5c033854310VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD&locale=en-US&name=seagate-completes-aquisition-samsungs-hdd-business-pr&vgnextrefresh=1&cmpid=lp_press_pr

If you look at Newegg's RMA FAQ, they're draconian.

For instance, they want you to remove all passwords from laptops or notebook computers if you RMA one. Interesting question - how do you do that if it's a HDD failure on the laptop? What happens if you RMA it because it was a faulty motherboard and now won't boot? A lot of their laptops/notebooks you can't remove the HDD to perform a wipe prior to returning it; a dead motherboard = returned laptop with data on HDD.

As for data privacy, it appears they have no policy whatsoever. RMA the drive direct to manufacturer and you may have some recourse... of course, I've also found that Seagate are assholes about packaging (in order to get an RMA from them once, I had to to two levels up for a supervisor who'd agree to send me a shipping box, as the Fedex and UPS offices in my area only provided packing peanuts and bubble wrap, and Seagate insists on "foam" or those weird plastic endpiece things).

Couldn't find one of these(750GB, 7200RPM) for anything reasonable?
I just decided to clone and expand the original disk onto the new drive - then saving the original as a restore disk.

Not sure how far back I got mine, but it was before everyone went OMGWTFFLOOD and left the territory of sane pricing.

You're wrong
There are only three now, as Samsung's hdd division has been bought by Seagate http://drive.seagate.com/content/samsung-en-us
And Hitachi by WD http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/23/western-digital-purchase-of-hitachis-hard-drive-business-approv/
Toshiba doesn't really count so now we have a duopoly ...... which is why they are doing it naturally...

From the specifications: Width (maximum) 2.760mm (70.10 in)

I may be wrong about it being a world first of course, some of the first hard drives were enormous.

Seagate published a paper to justify why they went with 128-bit AES. The bottom line is that 256-bit encryption impacted disk throughput. That said, their Momentus 7200 FDE line is just as fast as their non-encrypting line.

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/docs/pdf/whitepaper/tp596_128-bit_versus_256_bit.pdf

4TB is where it's at!

except it's already on the market. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/internal-storage/momentus-xt-kit/

No, you still don't get it. The meaning of MTBF is well understood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures

MTBF as it relates to drives is only valid when you take into account population stats and the lifespan of a drive into account (Assume lifespan is 3 years)

Say you use these drives:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/enterprise-ssd-hdd/constellation/constellation-2/#tTabContentSpecifications

You have an MTBF of 1,400,000 and 200,000 drives you will roughly see drives die every 7 hours. If you believe MTBF you will see about 1250 drive failures per year. This is ~0.62% which Seagate publishes as the annual failure rate.

Which also happens in the US.

Apple are the heavyweight in cheap consumer electronics, and American owned. We should be asking why they aren't building in the US, especially as most of what they "build" is putting together other companies' components.

And we should be defining what "make (or made)" and "build (or built)" mean. If I buy a motherboard from taiwan and build a computer from it in the US, is it "Made in America"? What if the motherboard is from taiwan, CPU from Arizona, hard drive and case from China, power supply from California and I build the computer in Dallas, is it "Made in America"? What if the parts are mostly from the US but they're assembled in Mexico, what is that? And we can take it further, what if the parts are made in the US but the rare earth elements used in those parts are from China, where is it "made"?

Car manufactures have been playing this game for years, buying parts from overseas but assembling the car in the US and calling them "American made". It's so bad that there's a American-Made Index where they rate cars based on how many of their parts come from the US and vehicles like the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord are more "American made" than the Chevy Traverse or Ford Explorer and American icons like the F-150 and Silverado don't even make the list, so people buying trucks from Ford or GM thinking they're supporting America really aren't, they'd be better off buying a Toyota Tundra.

Obviously if the metal, chemicals and other rare materials were mined in the US to make the parts in the US used to assemble the device in the US then it's 100% American made, but that's almost never going to happen so we need to clear this up before we can call something "Made in America".

No. most manufacturers define the terms as 1024 bytes per kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes per megabyte, 1000 megabytes per gigabyte, and 1000 gigabytes per terabyte. Which gets really confusing sometimes - they can't even stay consistent within their own system.

I haven't checked how Hitachi does it, but that's how Seagate and Western Digital do it. I would assume Hitachi marks them the same way.

No, actually, you're completely wrong.

Hitachi (click Specifications):

Capacity - One GB is equal to one billion bytes and one TB equals 1,000GB (one trillion bytes) when referring to hard drive capacity.

Seagate:

When referring to hard drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes.

Western Digital (click Specifications):

As used for storage capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million bytes, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes.

Some floppies use hybrid measurements, but hard drives have been entirely powers of ten for ages.

To pick just one example, do you know of any CF cards which compress all data on the fly in order to increase effective flash lifespan by reducing the total amount of data written? (Since the SSD controllers in question use hardware compression engines which can handle hundreds of megabytes per second throughput, this also has the nice side effect of increasing effective performance, unless you're storing incompressible data.)

This should be the job of the os, not some buggy controller that can screw it up horrendously.

Remove the 'smart' controllers that kill things, the os can know far more information about the drive and the data being written to it. The only extra feature that makes sense is to keep a map of how many times each sector has been written to on the disk in the smart data, so the os can read it upon initially booting so you don't lose record of things when switching operating systems.

Because of this normal filesystems are used, that assume to be on spinning harddrives

Worse still are cheap-ass SSDs that assume "normal" filesystems are being used, and corrupt your data if you aren't using windows.

Here is a test for you if you have bandwidth and can stop laughing after a logical period. Obviously it is a FIRMWARE UPDATER, don't actually run it!

Help doc (from a company who is very close to MS and others)
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=215451

Exe file (as I said, just don't run it!)
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/downloads/firmware/MomentusXT-ALL-SD25.exe

Idiots didn't even create a mechanism to alert false positive so we, "dumb users!" ignored the warning after doing a Kaspersky and Virustotal scan and run it.

Perhaps their low end line is bad *because* they bought Maxtor. Their enterprise line is still just fine, been cruising at ~1.5% AFR here for the last 5 years with ~90% Seagate disks.

1.5% AFR on enterprise drives? Is that averaged over the 5 year period? If not, that's very high. Even is it is, it's still high.

The funny thing is that Seagate AFR on their low-end SATA is lower than their Enterprise SATA (0.34 vs. 0.73, see here and here (ES) section 2.12. I understand that they assume that enterprise drives are used more than the desktop drives, but nowhere do they say so. In fact, they say the low-end SATA is perfect for desktop RAID.

Perhaps their low end line is bad *because* they bought Maxtor. Their enterprise line is still just fine, been cruising at ~1.5% AFR here for the last 5 years with ~90% Seagate disks.

1.5% AFR on enterprise drives? Is that averaged over the 5 year period? If not, that's very high. Even is it is, it's still high.

The funny thing is that Seagate AFR on their low-end SATA is lower than their Enterprise SATA (0.34 vs. 0.73, see here and here (ES) section 2.12. I understand that they assume that enterprise drives are used more than the desktop drives, but nowhere do they say so. In fact, they say the low-end SATA is perfect for desktop RAID.