Slashdot Mirror

It's 97MB/s per the specification sheet (PDF). You have to read the PDF, the HTML spec page doesn't have it.

They're also 12.5mm, which I think means no-go for most of my applications.

The caviar that I buy is branded "WD" also. Hmm...

"With WD, I know that when I need both a dromaeosaurid and some salted fish eggs, they're the place to go. It's so convenient." — Customer

I'm not sure who's the one with comprehension problems ;). What I'm saying is that if 90% of the drives fail within the first 6 months, the probability of significant numbers of them (depending on sample size and other stuff, which of course you don't actually reveal. See below) lasting more than a couple of years is extremely thin since, at best, they'd be following ~4-8% annualized failure rates as per the Google paper, and possibly much worse because WD drives are obviously so terrible.

Of course, this all depends on how one interpretes your story. Did 10% of your customers experience no failures, while the other 90% all lost their drives within 6 months? Or did all customers lose 90% of their drives? Or was that 10% of 10% of HDDs that survived? Really, between your two posts this is not very clear at all. Never mind though. The whole point of that part of my post was to set up the silly counter example, on which, by the way, you did not call me out. Which brings me to...

The "full of it" part was supposed to illustrate how foolish it is to use limited personal anecdotes (that's what they are, plural of anecdote != data) to make any strong statements, notice that I used my experience with ONE WD drive to counter your argument.

Also, a "ton" is not a suitable quantifier for the sample or population size, unless you're ordering your hard drives by weight. In that case, I'm not surprised that 90% of them fail immediately :D. For the sake of argument though, with a metric "tonne" this works out to about 1666 units at 600 grams per 2-platter hard drive (which is what the WD800 are). This is quite reasonable actually, but still about two orders of magnitude lower than google's.

I was able to find some graphs with HDD failures broken down by manufacturers. The difference between Seagate and WD is a whopping 0.48 percentage points. This might or might not be statistically significant, as no additional information is available. In any case, it's far from impressive. Here's the graph in question. It's based on RMAs from a PC equipment stores, and the whole thing is available here. It's in Russian, but the text doesn't say anything which isn't on the graphs.

I'm not taking this personally at all, and I have no stake in WD whatsoever, only in truth. This probably sounds way too cheesy, but that's what it is. Between the laptops, which mostly came with Hitachi drives, and a bunch of Seagate and Samsung drives in desktops, WD drives probably don't even make up the majority of all HDDs, and that's the only connection I have to WD. Do you work for Seagate, by the way? So far, I'm the only one who tried to use actual numbers and cited any sources (even if you don't like them), so the ball's in your court.

-----------

From another reply:
> I'd also like to quote that, as of right now the *only* message below the post you replied to that has been positively moderated is mine. Obviously I'm not alone in my experiences...

Well to be honest, now I'm really impressed. With the power of slashdot moderation statistics potentially on my side, I could finish my thesis in just a few hours! Anybody knows what's the proper MLA citation format for a slashdot moderation?

unless you count FW800, which I will as soon as I see a device that supports it

Here are two: my coupla-years-old Powerbook G4, and the external drive that sits on my desk at home.

Marketing people in technological companies often have no knowledge of technology and don't think it is important to have any.

Western Digital GreenPower Hard Drives seem to be heavily influenced by that attitude. There seems to be no information about actual speed, giving the impression that arrogant marketing people have decided that technically knowledgeable people can be manipulated, and won't notice that lack of specifications.

It's difficult to compete with Seagate's 5-Year Warranty, reliability is extremely important in most cases. The cost of a drive failure is far greater than any energy savings, except perhaps in large data centers with special software. The 5-year warranty says that Seagate management believes in the reliability of their hard drives, and will pay if they aren't reliable.

Both the Western Digital and Seagate web sites show the lack of interest in technology that is due to the arrogance of marketing people. The WD web site is heavily dependent on JavaScript; web site designers want to add JavaScript to their resume, but don't want to take the time to understand a complicated computer programming language, so JavaScript is often poorly written. The WD web site advises me that WD Enterprise Class GreenPower drives can hold "Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)". I imagine that will impress Slashdot readers who buy hardware for data centers. NOT.

The Seagate web site advises me that the search facility uses a certificate that is out of date. I am also advised to upgrade my version of Flash; I guess Seagate is sucked in by Macromedia/Adobe's method of advertising its name: Make everyone who visits web sites with Flash frequently see an advertisement to visit the Flash web site. Do that by bringing out numerous versions of Flash, and advising visitors to "updgrade".

The Seagate web site Flash is especially embarrassing. It says "Your On". Click on the Flash and it talks about "leveraging", a favorite word of those who don't understand technology. The CEO of Seagate supposedly tells us, "The explosive growth in digital devices, applications and content is breathtaking..."

The marketing of technical products is usually incompetent, dishonest, despicable, and self-destructive.

Marketing people in technological companies often have no knowledge of technology and don't think it is important to have any.

Western Digital GreenPower Hard Drives seem to be heavily influenced by that attitude. There seems to be no information about actual speed, giving the impression that arrogant marketing people have decided that technically knowledgeable people can be manipulated, and won't notice that lack of specifications.

It's difficult to compete with Seagate's 5-Year Warranty, reliability is extremely important in most cases. The cost of a drive failure is far greater than any energy savings, except perhaps in large data centers with special software. The 5-year warranty says that Seagate management believes in the reliability of their hard drives, and will pay if they aren't reliable.

Both the Western Digital and Seagate web sites show the lack of interest in technology that is due to the arrogance of marketing people. The WD web site is heavily dependent on JavaScript; web site designers want to add JavaScript to their resume, but don't want to take the time to understand a complicated computer programming language, so JavaScript is often poorly written. The WD web site advises me that WD Enterprise Class GreenPower drives can hold "Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)". I imagine that will impress Slashdot readers who buy hardware for data centers. NOT.

The Seagate web site advises me that the search facility uses a certificate that is out of date. I am also advised to upgrade my version of Flash; I guess Seagate is sucked in by Macromedia/Adobe's method of advertising its name: Make everyone who visits web sites with Flash frequently see an advertisement to visit the Flash web site. Do that by bringing out numerous versions of Flash, and advising visitors to "updgrade".

The Seagate web site Flash is especially embarrassing. It says "Your On". Click on the Flash and it talks about "leveraging", a favorite word of those who don't understand technology. The CEO of Seagate supposedly tells us, "The explosive growth in digital devices, applications and content is breathtaking..."

The marketing of technical products is usually incompetent, dishonest, despicable, and self-destructive.

I've been using one of these: http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=279 It does the job, and I only paid about $350 for it at Costco.

The now have a 2 terabyte version that allows for a 1 TB mirrored drive. http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=340

It's at Costco (again Canada) for $650.

Well, I just went through that exercise after researching for a few months. My goals (in order) were 100% free drivers, a significant decrease in noise and heat from my previous system, and small size. As a side benefit, I ended up completely legacy-free. Here's what I ended up with:

• Intel DG965PZ
• Intel Core2 E6600
• 4GB memory, two KVR800D2N5K2/2G kits
• WD1600AAJS 160GB HDD
• Plextor PX-755SA dual-layer DVDRW
• aOpen B200 case
• Samsung 244T 24" LCD

Cisco defines MTBF as "Mean time between failure. Time at which 50% of the units of interest will have failed; used as a measure of the time a user might reasonably expect a device or system to work before a fault occurs." http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/me ls/dwdm/dwdm_gl.htm#xtocid1301111

wiki defines MTBF as the reciprocal of the Failure rate (1 failure/16 million hours -> 16 million hours until a unit fails) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_fai lure

Seagate defines MTBF as "The average time before a failure will occur. This is not a warranty measurement. It is a calculation taking into consideration the MTBF of each component in a system, as well as, the statistical average operation time between the starting lifetime of a unit and the time of a failure. After a product has been in the field for a few years, the MTBF can become a field proven statistic." http://support.seagate.com/support/glossary/terms/ mean_time_between_failure.html

Western Digital's definition is also very similar http://westerndigital.com/en/library/gloss0803.pdf

In none of the definitions I can find online have I seen the warranty time span come into play.

If this drive has a 1.6 million hour MTBF you should indeed get 1.6 million hours of use from it.

From a batch perspective, if you had 182 of these drives, after 1 year, 1 of them would have a 50% chance of failing.

-Rick

The anonymous moron is repeating the same mistake that the xyz computing article did. Namely, paying too much attention to the interface speed. Current interface technology is capable of pumping data far faster than any single drive is able to achieve. Thus, with SATA being a single device point to point protocol, you need to pay more attention to the drive to buffer speed, not the buffer to host speed. Thus, the theoretical maximum throughput of this drive is limited to it's 93.5 MB/s disk to buffer speed.

It's because, due to DRM reasons, the software can only be installed on Western Digital Caviar drives.

Umm... today?

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products .asp?DriveID=94

http://westerndigital.com/en/library/sata/2579-001 098.pdf

Essentially, regular desktop drives will try for a very long time to correct read errors. RAID controllers will only wait about 8 seconds for a read. If the drive takes longer than that, the controller will treat it as failed and remove it from service. So WD offers a series of drives that will only try to correct errors for a short time and then return an error to the controller if they can't fix it in time.

You mean like this?

SATA: ...
* Available spindle speeds: 7200 RPM

Some SATA drives run to 10,000

As other posters have mentioned, software raid is fine for RAID 0, 1, 0+1. As you get to RAID 3,RAID 5, and RAID 6, however, your processing requirements go up quite a bit.

A SATA RAID 5 card with hardware XOR engine and a DIMM slot for cache might be a cost-effective option for you. (Goes for ~$180 on Pricewatch, or ~$240 on Dealtime)

Oh, and I would have goine with HGST, Western Digital, or Seagate for your drives... but I suppose hardware failure is what RAID 5 is for :)

How on earth anyone ever came to these conclusions (you're hardly the first person to say that), I'll never know.

Western Digital quotes nearly power consumption for their drives, when reading or idle, although that figure drops to about 1/20 if the drive is in sleep mode:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products .asp?DriveID=59

AMD quotes a power consumption about 50% below peak, when idle, although again that drops to 1/20 when halted:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white _papers_and_tech_docs/30430.pdf

However, your GPU is likely to be the biggest problem, as I'm unaware of them having a sleep mode (although maybe they do, anyone know?), leaving their consumption at half peak:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/ati -vs-nv-power_9.html

What this all means is that it's worth turning your computer off for any period of time longer than your start-up time, instead of letting it idle. If you put it to sleep, that figure becomes twenty times the startup time. For me, that's less than 20 minutes, not the 8+ hours I sleep for.

You?

Ha! I have you beat by over half with my 4.5 ms seek time!

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products .asp?DriveID=65

You should really try out some of the SATA RAID solutions. They offer the best bang for your buck. I know that the next time I have a few hundred dollars lying around I'm going to go with a 1 TB RAID 5 with some WD SATA 250s. Also, Supermicro makes a very nice 5 drive chassis that only takes up 3 - 5.25" bays. This is the ideal home setup in my mind.

He will use $7.55 of electricity for an entire year. I don't think that will break him.

Throw a serial ATA card into your PC and get one or two Westerm Digital Raptor drives (37.6GB) You won't be at 50GB, but you'll get 10k rpm performance and a five year warranty...drive is about $120-$150.

And then you can keep your left nut :-)

2. what server needs USB2 ? cameras? video devices? get outa here...

Inexpensive backup? Get an external USB2 drive and back up your device as & when.

moog

"...as he takes comfort in only buying WD, once again :)"

WD seems to not be using their own medicine.

Uh, how well do hard disk drives actually work when in the trunk of a car involved in a high speed chase? This brings new meaning to the phrase "head crash", doesn't it? Seems like the lower-tech VCR would be more reliable in this case...

With 261,000 hard drives, and each hard drive to say operate for 250,000 hours mean-time between failures, there could be a disk failure about each hour within the system!!

Uhm, MTBF doesn't exactly work like that. Assuming they buy drives in 10k batches, that means they have approximately 285k hours before all 10k drives reach the end of their guaranteed reliability period. The drives in my home servers and the SOHO servers I've implemented tend to live out their MTBF ratings in active use, then gain an additional hundred thousand hours or so of use in a workstation or two before being retired.

If you buy cheap, faulty, low-quality hard drives, yes, you're going to encounter drive failures on a regular basis.

Any organization rolling out tens or hundreds of thousands of drives who doesn't do their research (and testing) first deserves whatever they get. (And purchasing for servers the above referenced "value" drives - a class suitable only for home user desktops - is definately a first class blunder)

Moreover, they aren't terribly likely to be implementing "value" drives (the ones that typically come with such low MTBF ratings), but more likely something like the WD Raptor, Seagate Cheetah 10k.6 or similar with 1.2 million hour MTBF ratings.

Searching the WD site, I found the product page for the drive you are talking about, the "WD Raptor Enterprise Serial ATA Hard Drive 36.7 GB 10,000 RPM", a.k.a WD360GD.

Also, Pricewatch has a listing for the yet-to-be-shipped drive, with an E.T.A. of "end of March." Price: About $165. Not too cheap for a 36 GB ATA drive...

How about someone making a hard drive that isn't going to give up after a year?

-Lucas

A friend of mine has one of these. Plenty fast enough, but you won't being paying $120 either. Newegg is selling for $160.

It's really too bad that so much effort was put into USB 2.0 when FireWire was available.

They have virtually identical practical transfer rates, so the additional capabilities of USB 2.0 go to waste - unless, I suppose, you find yourself doing huge amounts of simultaneous data transfer to multiple USB 2.0 devices on the same bus.

FireWire also sports two great benefits: more power (requires the 6-pin verion that is sadly not found on many smaller devices and x86 laptops) and no host-specific controller. People talk about putting Linux on a PDA and using USB to control devices from it, but until USB On-the-Go becomes pervasive, this cannot be a reality. On the other hand, Any FireWire device can communicate with any other.

FireWire is a more flexible standard, and with planned upgrades to 800 Mbps and higher, there's no shortage to it's possibilities.

If someone would just make a drive that doesn't use an IDE/FireWire bridge but actually has an on-drive FireWire interface, the benefits could be substantial.

*sigh*

As a note, you can get FireWire hard drives, , scanners, printers, and the Kodak DCS Pro 14n 14 megapixel camera will use FireWire

Still, I'd trust an expensive 5400RPM drive much more than a 15000RPM drive. Those high-speed drives pump out enormous heat, and I'd be surprised if their reliability was any better than an IDE drive.

Seagate

Western Digital

Maxtor

Quantum

WD is *supposed* to be selling:
180, 200GB 7200 RPM drives, but I havn't seen any for sale yet.

Oh, they're for sale. They just aren't shipping. Quickest bet is from Western Digital themselves, but the ship date is still 2-4 weeks off - and that's their new estimate after they didn't ship a couple weeks ago, so who knows when it will really happen. :(

Tough times for anyone needing another 2+TB box online soon.

Now, with a link that works!

Have you seen this?:) I wonder when they're going after WD:P

Didn't anybody read the actual article? The drive comes with a free Promise Technology Ultra ATA Controller Card.

The also explain the 137 gig barrier

28-bit addressing, there are only 28 bits available to access a given address on the hard drive, which when all bits are set equates to 137 GB.

By doubling the number of bits that can be used to access a given address, 48-bit LBA addressing pushes the maximum storage limit to 144 petabytes.

Hmmm, how does going from 28 to 48 bits double the number of bits?

Well how long before we will need to change again? It was not long ago that they came up with the 28 bit system. 137 gigs - no one will ever need that much memory. Now its 144 petabytes - no one will ever need that much memory. Hell a quantum transporter will need at least 4 yottabytes. I say go to 128 bit addressing just to be safe.

In addition, HD designers are not easily going to overcome the fact that it takes a while to move the head from the inside to the outside of the platter.

They haven't exactly been making much progress here, either. Compare the seek-time specs for the Seagate ST15150W, one of the first 7200rpm hard drives, to the Western Digital WD1200JB, one of the most advanced IDE hard drives currently available. The ST15150W (Barracuda 4) has been around for years, but it still boasts faster track-to-track, full-stroke, and average seek times. IME, while the sustained data rate from the 'Cudas isn't that impressive (I measured about 6 or 7 MB/s from them once), it'll still deliver better small-file and medium-file performance than many newer drives...especially IDE drives, and especially if you have lots of scattered accesses going at once.

If you have the money for SCSI or Fibre Channel, you can get faster seek times with current products (the ST336752LW boasts a 4-ms average seek time and a full-stroke seek time faster than other drives' average seek time...being a 15krpm drive also doesn't hurt :-) ). Migrating this kind of performance into desktop IDE hard drives would make more of a difference than ATA133.

Oh, wait, no, find me simply a 7200 RPM IDE drive with 8MB of cache onboard.

Take a look at the Western Digital 120 GB 7200 RPM IDE drive WITH 8MB of cache...

On the other hand I do agree wholeheartly that SCSI is the way to go for fault tolerent server applications.

While I agree that SCSI is better for servers, I can satisfy this request:

Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 7200 Hard Drive WD1000JB

I assume the less expensive drives obtain power from the port

I thought all firewire devices got there power from the bus not an external plug.

"Multimedia" compression is without exception lossy compression

I think I've heard of lossless compressed-audio codecs, but I can't recall any names off the top of my head. For video editing, WAV has been sufficient as the few hundred megs needed for audio is nothing compared to the tens of gigabytes needed for video. As for MP3, I've been using 160-kbps VBR lately with LAME for CD rips. I can't tell the difference, but then I don't claim to have "golden ears" either. Tape rips get 128-kbps VBR as there's already been a fair amount of loss introduced when the tape was produced.

Western Digital has an external disk drive with an IEEE 1394 interface. I don't know whether it's an IDE drive with an IDE1394 bridge inside, or a drive whose native interface is 1394.

Western Drive Caviar 30.0GB, 5400 RPM, EIDE Hard Drive: $223.97
http://store.westerndigital.com:80/store/product.a sp?registered=0&dept%5Fid=2&pf%5F id=101

Seagate Barracuda 28.0GB, 7200 RPM, EIDE ULTRA ATA/66: $199.99
http://www.computers4sure .com/Product.asp?ProductId=80260

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 27.2GB EIDE UltraDMA/66 5400 rpm internal hard drive: $191.99
http://www.egghead.com/ca tegory/inv/00041912/02351925.htm

Maxtor 40.0GB EIDE, ULTRA-DMA/66, 5400 RPM, 9 ms: $252.95
http://www.buy.com/comp/product.as p?sku=10227545

So, basically, $7.47, $7.14, $7.07, and $6.33 per a gigabyte. A single-sided DVD holds 4.7 GB (which most movies come on). Thus, it will cost about $35, $33.50, $33.20, or $29.75 for the storage space to keep a single DVD on each of the above drives, respectively.

I'm not sure about how effective software data compression programs will work on MPEG-2 encoded video, but that could be a further means to reduce space (thus cost).

Basically, the price per gigabyte of hard drives is not yet where it needs to be to make DVD backup cost effective, but next year it will be.

Anyone else care to present an analysis?

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/arch-storage/part2/sectio n-151.html (Very thorough and careful)

http://www.westerndigital.com/products/drives/driv ers-ed/mtbf.html (What Western Digital has to say about MTBF)

http://www.storage.ibm.com/storage/oem/tech/mtbf.h tm (What IBM has to say about MTBF)

--------------------

As an aside, this is an interesting example of the breakdown of moderation on Slashdot. Several people are posting fairly coherent and, at least, pseudo-technical explanations about the calculation of MTBF, but I wasn't able to resolve who was right. The moderation points did not help me either, because they are being assigned by random people I can't trust. I thought, "It is unlikely that very many people on Slashdot actually know how how MTBF is done," and, "It is unlikely that those who actually do know MTBF have the moderation points."

For controllers, western digital has URL's at this main link. Click on the "Solutions" link to go to suggested solutions for common problems with UDMA/66. For prebuilt IDE RAID system, try here.