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Seagate Acknowledges Problems With 1.5-TB HDD
AnInkle writes "Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda has been available for a couple months from multiple retailers. But shortly after release, reports of random freezes appeared on several sites. The hang apparently occurs in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Vista when streaming video or transferring files at low speeds. After a couple of weeks of silence, Seagate has finally officially acknowledged the problem. In a response to The Tech Report, they say they're investigating the 'issue' affecting 'a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives.' Acknowledging the 'inconvenience' is a start, but most users expect at least average performance and prompt service from the capacity king of data storage." In a related story, reader Lucas123 plugs a ComputerWorld piece examining the question of Seagate's plans to stay relevant at a time when SSDs increasingly capture OEM mindshare.
The problem appears to manifest itself in lockups for 30 seconds or so at a time which kills music streaming, video streaming, etc. The only reports of success appear to be from people who are using it for an archive disk and thats it. Some people claim the problem can be avoided somewhat by disabling the write cache, but naturally you get a serious performance hit from that (especially since the memory cache is 32MB!)
Reading the forums, it appears that Seagate has not only thus told people that the drives aren't meant for a RAID environment, but even gone so far as to tell people that RAID doesn't stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but rather "Independent Drives". Hmm. Seems that time has changed this definition (FOLDOC and Wikipedia seem to claim the change in name as well).
I'm rather disappointed since now that I have a taste for a 1.5TB drive, I'm not looking to buy "just" a 1TB. Hopefully one of these companies can resolve this.
On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I've never had too many problems with seagate, and consider them to be a great brand. I also like western digital, but when I have a choice, I go seagate for the 5 year warranty.
As for SSD drives, I'm not exactly sure what everybody's worried about here. I don't see any affordable SSD drives, let alone any in the 1TB range.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Why is a good large storage solution nowadays?
I am having corruption problems with my My Book external USB drives.
Where are SSDs "capturing mindshare" anywhere other than the portable market?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I buy only raptors. Therefore, hard drive technology is currently at 300GB.
I can see SSD being safer than hard drives, but are they not a lot lower?
Put it as my secondary Hard drive. Unless that is your only drive, I would tend to not put such a big hard drive as my main. Then the entire OS wouldn't slow down at once.
The comments on that page are pretty harsh. I've never had a problem with Seagate and would still put it with WD as my favorites, but I am curious as to what is causing this, more cache needed?
The real problem with these drives, or the scary problem, is the folks using these in RAID arrays, or things like the Drobo. The drive freaks out, so the array marks it bad. You pop the drive out and put in a new one, or even the same one again, to start a rebuild. But another drive freaks out during that process, array says "oh crap, another bad drive!" and your data goes to /dev/null. Even though no data was ever actually lost... just bad drives.
SSD's are not capturing the mindshare (B.S. buzzword if you ask me). Sure, they're the new, the shiny, but most people have never seen one available in a device they were looking to purchase. I'd be willing to wager that half of all computer users don't even know what SSD stands for. SSD's won't make HDDs obsolete until they are a better choice for all aspects of computer use. There is a reason magnetic storage has had such a long run in an industry that changes as much as computers. HDDs will not be a loss industry until SSDs are faster at reading, faster at writing, cheaper in $/GB, AND more reliable than HDDs.
-=Bang Bang=-
The 1.5TB drive is part of a family of Seagate drives, the 7200.11 drives. Supposedly the only differences between the different drives in the family are the number of platters and the size of the cache. So if there's a bug, I would expect the same issue with the smaller 7200.11 drives. (If not, the the root cause is probably related to the increase in power draw from spinning the fourth platter.)
thats why i buy only from seagates sv35 line of hard drives optimized for video streams.
and they arent more expensive than the regulars and come with larger warranties and 1tb capacities.
This is how Seagate "stays relevant" against SSD's:
"We sell decent storage drives that don't cost thousands of dollars"
Seriously, SSDs just aren't there yet, nor are they going to be in the foreseeable future. They're a niche item for laptops because they should theoretically use a lot less power without having to power a mechanical drive. They should also be a lot more reliable. However, the point is that I can't go out and buy a 1.5 TB SSD.
Small percentage of HD's, 100% of Barracuda 1.5TB buyers? Well, it's a start.... and this time it's really not Vista?
Hey wait, I think I have one of th-
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
Seagate will stay relevant even after SSDs have hit the mass market.
For storing very large files, the old magnetic HDD will stay relevant for a long time (because it's cheap).
Given that the effective useful life for flash memory in thumbdrives seems to vary between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles, what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS? Any computing that hits the swap space heavily is going to be thrashing the lifespan of the drive. SSDs can be faster and have lower power consumption, but if you have to replace them more often, they're going to have to be cheaper than platter drives to make them better.
Sony Vaio Laptop. Someone in my company almost bought one. Thankfully they came to me for advice before sinking money on their "new" personal machine.
I pointed out the following: the SSD drive was a mere 32 GB.
A standard installation (infection?) of Windows Vista (and no XP-downgrade option, Sony won't give you the drivers) eats up a good 12 of that. Office 2007 (yeah yeah I know, I work with what they use), another 6 easily. Miscellaneous preloads, drivers, "service" software, and of course the (ugh) "restore partition" eat up another 4-5. Swap file eats another 1-2.
Functionally, their "32 GB SSD drive" has about 7 GB of usable space before it maxes out in which they have to fit all their programs, utilities, miscellaneous pictures/video of the kids, games... or they can buy a normal laptop and we can get them a 500 GB internal drive and they're good to go for a decently long while.
And THAT is why the SSD's, even though OEM's would love to use them for marketroid reasons, are going to be a long time in making anything obsolete. I wouldn't use anything less than a 500GB drive for a machine today, whether laptop OR desktop, and the largest commercial SSD currently is a mere 128 GB.
I just got some of the 7200.11 1TB seagate drives about a month ago - one I use with an eSata case to hold an Aperture (photo editing) library, the other I use as a drive to store and replay HDTV streams captured OTA from an elGato receiver in a Firewire case. I have yet to see any lockups or freezes like those described, and I'm using them in ways that would seem to be worst case.
So, I'd go ahead with the purchase.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I almost lost my coffee on that "mindshare" bit. Apple is pretty much at the forefront of yuppy technology "mindshare," and the SSD isn't standard - even on the Macbook Air. Not much of a chance the unwashed masses are looking at SSD any time soon, unless they're buying a workstation laptop replacement.
The tech is not at all price per gig competitive, and only Intel has an SSD that outperforms traditional hard drives on speed and battery life by any significant margin.
The coolest thing SSD could provide is a RAID-like array (with a REAL controller) in the size of a 2.5" hard drive, splitting up the memory banks for stripe, mirror, or combinations of the two, since the platters seem like they have reached a horizon for getting smaller. Some intelligent file systems could be laid on top of that, and could simply prompt when you first set up your computer for your chosen arrangement, and even switch later on if your storage needs change.
From reading the reviews from the usual hardware sites, this looked like a pretty impressive drive. Whatever this is, I hope Seagate clears this mess up.
CIte your authority. NTFS is partially journaled as well.
I smell a rat.
FS like ext3 can be partitioned in any number of usable ways for streams; a 1.5TB drive isn't that large.
And it wasn't that long ago that NTFS couldn't be used on a volume larger than 4GB.... then 32GB.
And additionally, take your 235 Microsoft patents violated and cite them, too.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
No matter whether a hard drive is made for "streaming" or not, it's ridiculous that it freezes doing it. No other hard drive does so, and I own some SeaGate ones.
Given that the effective useful life for flash memory in thumbdrives seems to vary between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles, what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS? Any computing that hits the swap space heavily is going to be thrashing the lifespan of the drive. SSDs can be faster and have lower power consumption, but if you have to replace them more often, they're going to have to be cheaper than platter drives to make them better.
Thumb drives are cheap and use cheap chips. It's my understanding that SSD's are made with flash that is better made for frequent writes. If it wasn't, i don't even see why they make SSDs, since CompactFlash cards already use a standard IDE interface.
Anyone have some info on this?
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Unfortunately, if you read real performance reviews on SSD, you'll find that some of them have better performance and worse power consumption, or better power consumption and worse performance, not to mention all of them are seriously lacking in storage capacity. Someday we'll have SSD drives with better performance, better power consumption, and equivalent capacity, but not any time soon.
HDD manufacturers will always face a large amount of negative press. The reason is simple. If your DVD drive breaks...ho-hum I'm out $XX and need a new one. Guess I'm not watching Kung Fu Panda tonight. If your HDD breaks...OMFG!!!I had 5 years of tax returns, 20000 hours of music, 1000s of irreplaceable pictures!...and I'm out $XX!!!
Simply put, the cost of failure for a storage manufacturer is an order of magnitude above the rest of the industry. People don't just lose money, they lose memories, they lose costly business information. Of course you and I know that we should back up our data. But its hindsight talking, because we've probably lost data before too.
-=Bang Bang=-
I've been using ext3 & LVM with mdadm on a raid5 array that is 6+1par+1hotspare x 1TB drives.
I'm just guessing, but I'd guess that that would count as a 'very large partition' yet I've had no problems with journaling over the last year.
Cite a source, or at least.. some kind of elaboration on the "serious issues"
I'd like to read about it, not saying its false or anything, just I've been looking into other options.
There are two different technologies for SSDs, single and multicell. The former is used in the $600 for 32 GB enterprise drives, the later in the $100 for 128 GB cheapos. The MC drives are the ones with the low write cycles. But if you use your SSD in a fast read-little write application like a database server it lasts forever and you can take advantage of the blazing read spead (most write performance I've seen isn't much ahead of a good HD array).
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
On a lot of 60, a random subsample of 10:
- 7 have been nothing but blissful
- 2 throw random errors enough to stall a raid array
- 1 just hangs the controller after some amount of time.
Not saying the percentages bear out over the long haul, but people saying "WFM" are probably telling the truth, as are those complaining of errors.
-- (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Been running a couple in RAID1 for a month or so on a Mac Pro and a third in a DVR with no issues so far (touch wood).. maybe it's only a specific firmware revision that's afflicted.
This is a relatively new drive. If you really need stable performance, you probably should buy something more time-tested, like a well-reviewed 1 TB unit.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
Swap is a compromise, and ram is cheap now. You don't actually need swap at this point if you get enough ram. The only exception being Linux distros apparent obsession with using the swap file/partition for hibernation by default.
Get enough RAM and you can make your storage decisions based on the things that actually matter, speed, space and reliability over time.
Seagate appears to have started going downhill after acquiring Maxtor. First there was the infamous AAKS firmware bug that was discussed at length here in /. that made a specific model of Seagate drive underperform. In various web forums, people have also started complaining about more noise when Seagate harddrives perform seek operations, along with other firmware related bugs affecting burst speed performance. Seagate also now appears to be behind Western Digital in terms of performance on its line of desktop hard drives. All these happening after the Maxtor acquisition.
They have started to use MLC chips in a lot of things to drive the cost per GB down faster, and MLC has a lower rated write lifetime.
From 7200.11 series Seagate switched to a completely new firmware, so a new bunch of bugs is not unexpected :)
i love how people spend a couple hundred dollars and then act as if they bought a company instead of a product. people think they are so entitled.
I think it shouldn't matter the definition, either way Seagate has no excuse. That out of the way..
But the whole theory of RAID doesn't dictate anything about price nor, in my opinion, even require them to be 'disks'. Maybe 'inexpensive disks' is the term coined by the originator, but I think the originator should recognize the more general applicability of the concept.
For ultimate wrongness with respect to the declared meaning, how about a RAID-0 of high-capacity SSDs. A non-redundant array of expensive non-disk things.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"But its hindsight talking, because we've probably lost data before too"
Yeah, I've lost several years of insightful posts from MaxwellEdision. Seriously it's easy to say backup. But when the drives in question are Terabyte drives. What are you going to back them up to, and if it's another Terabyte drive then you are right back to the reliability problem that prompted the backup policy in the first place?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
"I suspect once capacity gets within 2/3 of harddrive space, you'll see a jump from mechanical to SSD bigtime. I think it will happen within 5 years."
I suspect even sooner you'll see hybrid HDD/SSD drives.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
"Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware."
"We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions."
"Affected part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18."
The official statement is slightly misleading...
1) When the problem occurs all hard drive operations stop until the OS times out the ATA command - typically 30 seconds. This results in the computer freezing for 30 seconds.
2) The problem can result in data loss if using a RAID system. Depending on the OS/RAID configuration the problem may cause a RAID system to think the drive has died. The RAID system automatically removes the drive and continues to run degraded (as designed). 20 minutes later when another drive exhibits the problem the RAID system drops the second drive and dies.
3) The problem may be a systematic problem rather than a small number of drives - all drives have I tested running the SD17 firmware have exhibited the problem.
I've been using ext3 & LVM with mdadm on a raid5 array that is 6+1par+1hotspare x 1TB drives.
You'd be better off running RAID-6 or RAID-DP. Less risk for the same amount of disks. Sorry, I'll take any excuse to say RAID-DP.
It's always fun to bring up DP in a meeting with a straight face then follow it up with, "as in RAID-DP, why what did you think I meant?"
We have an 8.8 TB ext3, no problems. It admittedly takes a while to mkfs, but that is a small small slice of the lifecycle of a filesystem. This FS has been in service for over two years.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
than Seagate execs is a cheetah.
Segate doesn't honor its 5 yr warranty directly if the drive came via OEM (HP for example).
To claim on those, the drive (the whole box in some instances) has to be sent back to the OEM including freight charges.
The OEMs don't necessarily honor parts warranty like Seagates unless the fault occurs within their standard warranty period of 12 months.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Reliability. I'll take it over speed. I'll take it over capacity. Most of the time.
Give me a 500 GB drive that's guaranteed for 10 years and I'll be a customer.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS?
All that depends on the OS and demand.
I've got 2 linux boxes, one with 1GB ram and another with 2GB and they have never used any swap space.
Lots of ram + SSD with no swap partition will make linux work ok if you don't open excessive amnts of apps at the same time.
No hope with WinX however.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
And it wasn't that long ago that NTFS couldn't be used on a volume larger than 4GB.... then 32GB.
What?
Are you talking about Fat16/Fat32??? From what I remember, the 32gb was an OS imposed limit on XP...... until sp2 maybe? I don't remember exactly....
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm
Karnal
Entitled to a product that functions as advertised? Wow, people are so spoiled!
Seriously, is it so unreasonable to expect a drive to not hang randomly during normal usage?
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Different versions had different capacity. The current version can handle exabytes, depending on several different factors in terms of cluster and extent size. Layout efficiency is debatable, and there is little done in typification and therefore decent research on performance of the current NTFS vs ZFS vs ext3 vs Reiser and other file systems, even ancient ones and experimental ones.
Th NTFS has limitations on the number of files/folders, but it's irrelevant here.
So is the original post.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Back in July I finally decided to complete my home workstation and purchase my storage array.. So I ended up buying six of the 1TB drives and putting them in raid6.. Then a couple of months later these 1.5TB drives came out at the same price that I paid for the 1TB drives. I was really mad at the time, but apparently they were released too soon and without proper QA. I get amazing performance out of my 1TB drives in RAID, and although I would have liked a 50% bigger array, I would have been really disappointed to take that big of a hit in performance. Didn't think you could go wrong with Seagate, but apparently you can. Guess I'll buy WD next time.
I got two of these brand new drives sitting next to me right now with the same part number and firmware revision. A hidden voice inside of me said to wait a while before I use 'em... I was going to put them in a ZFS setup too... thanks for the heads up /.!
Death Penalty?
This is not the funny you're looking for.
Inexpensive has no meaning in RAIDs of today, if it ever did.
If a single pair of disks matching the performance of my RAID could be had (for say, twice as much money) then yes, my disks would be "inexpensive". But such a disk set doesn't exist (or didn't at the time), and saving money was certainly not our intention.
Yeah, saving the money was the intention. Reliability was the issue at hand. You had very high quality drives that were ludicrously expensive and these crapola microcomputer drives that were cheap, but too unreliable. But if you wrote data to two of them and had a hotspare you could get as reliable total storage for an order of magnitude (or two) less money.
The same is true today. Show me a 1TB drive that has the same MTBF as the mirror+hotspare above. You can do it with an SLC SSD, but you're, again, two orders of magnitude more expensive. Don't get me wrong, I'm all hot for a terabyte of solid state storage, but the $30K pricetag makes it the wrong choice for 99% of storage needs.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I don't understand this attitude either.
Are we as customers supposed to EXPECT failure now? WTF? Seriously?
I want my product to function as advertised, whether it's a $6.99 hand-cranked radio from Wal-Mart or a $3000 Mac Pro.
If there is a problem with the product, I have every right to call the company out on it, criticize them, and make a stink.
Yes, problems happen. But we shouldn't *expect* them.
If everyone were like the GP, imagine how crappy quality would be in.. well, everything!
Seagate's Mike Hall: "I'm looking into this and will get back to you once I know more."
Translation: "I don't know anything about this. I just spent 2 months in Cancun playing golf and sipping pina coladas on the company tab. I really want to go back, and thinking about all the senoritas there is more important to me than trying to figure this massive problem out, and giving our paying customers and share holders an answer isn't something I feel like doing right now. I'm only a spokesman, and, seeing as how I am too stupid read our own product info releases, especially explaining why we recomended it for RAID applications, and then said it wasn't meant for such applications, resolving such a problem is way out of my league."
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I'm glad I bought the WD 1 TB Caviar Black instead
Ranting Asshole Is Disturbed
A sour grapes addendum to my "THEY ARE INEXPENSIVE" reply to your query:
Hey, why don't you ask Seagate to fly you to Santa Cruz or San Diego, with a side trip to Las Vegas?
(Assumimg you are in eastern North America)
This is what IBM did for us about 20+ years ago when we were considering upgrading a dozen or so disk drives... ... ahh fukit.. I forget- Personnel Manager? Manager of Payroll? Accounting VP? - to this freebie/ extravaganza.
Of course, I as the tech / systems programmer / "expert" didn't even hear about the cross-continent trip til a year or so later.
"Shhhhh!"
The IBM sales rep invited three guys from my company - the operations manager, the
Just to sell us a few disk drives.
No doubt these suits were regaled with stories of how Count-Key-data was far superior to Fixed-Block architecture on the disks and how the cooling fans, excuse me, the AMDs** were superior to the cheap jap competition.
blah blah lah...
OK. I didn't get to go.
Sure- sour grapes, I admit.
But do you wonder why now disks, even EXPENSIVE ones are thought of as "inexpensive"?
These days, would you get flown across the continent for three days for the sale of a few so-called "expensive" disks?
** "Air Moving Devices" LOL! /rant
-
-- Thanks. I needed that!
.
- aqk
F U
... so I don't buy stuff made by Seagate, anymore.
One might expect this issue would be management just not wanting to pay extra for their support people to be trained in how to help Linux users (although what Linux users really want is something that just does the right thing like other hard drive makers are able to do).
Their older external drives they marketed as "push button" series in the gray and black enclosure work just fine. But the newer models freeze up a lot. It appears they don't handle the USB commands consistently when the drive spins down. The next command then gets an error instead of spinning the drive back up. Once it has spun down, the only way to get it to spin back up is power cycle it. But that messes up a mounted filesystem. One workaround is to hit it about every 20 or 30 seconds (some drives spin down after 1 minute of idle) with a direct (bypass cache) read command to keep it from spinning down. But then the drive gets rather hot (and for the USB power ones it can run down a laptop faster).
So this is some kind of engineering problem, probably in their firmware. But there is still a real possibility that it is management interference in the engineering design process. Or it may be some fundamental issue with their engineering development process.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
From http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863
I work in a datacenter that has been known to use seagate 500 / 750 / 1TB drives.. and they suck. plain and simple they suck. I really wish I could say more but I can't and I write too slow in order to do it anyways ;)
I'm surprised not to find a single reference to Samsung hard disks in this discussion.
From what I know (can't find the source, it was a magazine I read a few years ago), Samsung is one manufacturer that builds all the components inside the HDD by itself. As a result the disks are more reliable since they don't contain stuff from other parties and it is easier to put things together.
In my geographical area Samsung HDDs come with the longest warranty period (3 years vs 1.5 years in the case of WD or Seagate).
The saddest poem
ahahahahahahahaha :)
One day walking into the local Futureshop (Best Buy for Canadians) I saw a cool deal on a "Readyboost" enabled 2gb Flash drive. The drive had a big readyboost logo and boasted on how good it was for such task. Setting up vista I put the drive in and enabled it for readyboost. In one day that thing will transfer about 250-300gb (that's combined) so about 100-200gb write in 24 hours.
... and a nice low number 150gb of write
... so give or take 4650gb of write to that flash in one month. It's on month 3 of operation. Hammer some torrents or other I/O intensive stuff and the thing writes even more. I used a cool readyboost monitor I found on the internet to monitor all this. Check it out ... I also found that the readyboost kinda slowed things down cause once in awhile you have to wait for it to do it's thing before it does what you want. Maybe it's just my machine being slow but I noticed no improvement.
This thing has been working for 3 months. Every time I come into the room all I see is the flash drive blinking away. So lets put out some rough math. (Oh the drive is at full capacity with the readyboost stuff) so the ablity to just keep writing to unused places doesn't work.
I'll use write for fun
150x31=4650
Solosoft.org - Your Online Resource to Nothing
1) When the problem occurs all hard drive operations stop until the OS times out the ATA command - typically 30 seconds. This results in the computer freezing for 30 seconds.
If the OS freezes the computer for hard drive accesses then we need new OS designers
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Here's what nerds do:
They go to newegg.
They go the the hard drives section.
They pick narrow it down to SATA II.
They sort by lowest price.
They middle-click a few Seagates that are around their capacity requirement.
They double check the 5 year warranty.
They make sure any bad reviews are from idiots who don't know what they're doing.
They pick one based on cost and capacity.
OEMs like SSDs because of the margins they can get, sure. But until DELL stops selling HDDs, Seagate and Western Digital and Hitachi have nothing to worry about in that department.
Besides, it's not as if Seagate is skipping SSDs.
I think you're confusing NTFS and FAT. On some older Microsoft OSs the installer would not allow you to install the OS on an NTFS partition larger than 4GB. You could create/format larger NTFS partitions, and even restore an OS image to a larger partition, but the installer didn't support it. I've never seen a report that the MS implementation of NTFS was ever limited to something as small as 32GB.
FAT12 is limited to 32MB, FAT16 to 4GB (though most implementations only support 2GB), and FAT32 to 2-8TB (though implementations vary support from as little as 32GB).
I buy mostly HP & Dells at my work. We always buy models w/ 3yr warranties or better and are not consumer models. Our building also has a very high hard drive failure rate. Techs in buildings near mine have the same problem. (There are a lot of theories as too why, but nothing proven yet.)
Every time I've had a drive fail I've had HP or Dell ship me the replacement drive. I can keep the failed/failing drive for 3 -7 business days after the new drive arrival and then I ship the bad drive back with the provided shipping label. This may be part of the extra cost of buying business models, but it is very handy. They'll even be happy to ship mobo's this way if you are interested.
Need I say more?
>>> For whatever reasons the otherwise smart chaps who devised RAID decided to use that word, at no stage was it a characteristic of RAIDsets that they were made of inexpensive disks.
Whatever reason(s)? The reason was obvious: they WERE inexpensive, even if by your estimate, they were "expensive".
They WERE CHEAP! - When compared with the mainframe standard disk-drives of 20 years ago!
See my explanation(s) elsewhere in this thread.
The RAID word is "INEXPENSIVE" And with good reason.
End of argument.
.
- aqk
F U
I don't know about serious issues, but I know that any video I use with this drive dies from 1-10 minutes because the drive freezes. I have 3 of these drives, and have the same difference.
How did you find out what firmware the drive had? (Running on a Debian system)
It doesn't happen often enough in my line. And it is faster and easier to replace the drive and toss the defective one if it comes from an OEM like HP/Dell.
Most are 4yr old 40GB drives anyway, so it's pretty pointless getting a 'new' 40GB drive. They are just too small nowadays.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Thanks for being one of the few not to descend to personal attacks/
To others: well, I might be wrong on this point - I certainly can see both sides of the argument, and I've chosen one. If that necessarily means to you that I therefore cannot be an engineer, well, you have bigger problems than some twit on slashdot disagreeing with you on a piece of terminology, and can only conclude that to be qualified, one must be in agreement with you completely. You've got to at least accept that it took more balls from me to log in push an unpopular viewpoint than it took for you to take a stab while providing no more of a counterargument than reminding me of the title of a 20 year old paper, simply appealing to authority and tradition.
Well, rethinking this, it's a lot like other acronyms that were unfortunately coined, and make sense only in the historical context- and have since been conveniently corrupted to make them more current. /. argument on what DVD means? LOL! ...
One I can immediately think of is "DVD"-
Wanna start a whole new
There are a couple of other ambiguous acronyms whose arcane abbreviations escape me now. Perhaps just as well.
Migod- just noticed my alliteration above! Am I suffering from some sort of spoonerism?
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- aqk
F U
Not if you install them on their sides...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
At the time RAID was first publicized the difference between "inexpensive" drives and fast, less unreliable, higher capacity drives was over an order of magnitude. Using lesser drives allowed for at least three to one drop in per-byte cost, and raid5 provided better reliability than any single drive available.