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A Look Under Western Digital's Hood
Tom's Hardware got a rare opportunity to explore the Western Digital campus and show us what goes on under the hood of one of the favorites in storage tech. "When you buy a car, you look under the hood. Given the critical importance of hard disk storage in all of our lives, we thought you might want a peek under that hood, too. Now that Western Digital is in the business of breaking new capacity records (the latest Caviar Green was the first drive to hit 2TB, for example), we jumped at the chance to take a first-ever, unrestricted tour of its California R&D facilities. This is the place where magnetic technology of the 1950s meets the nano- and quantum-level technologies of the current decade."
Given the critical importance of hard disk storage in all of our lives
Much like cars, once you've been burned once... it's hard to place trust in a company. For example, I purchased two IBM deathstar (actually called deskstar, but nicked as such because of their high failure rate) hard drives. Both failed within 5 months. I'd avoid an ibm item like the plague, even out of simple paranoia.
In the same regard, I had a WD hard drive, 40GB, fail on me. That was about 8 years ago. I haven't looked back. Anyone have any first hand experience with WD's reliability as of late? I know that a couple of years ago, Seagate beat WD'd warranty period by at least 3 years on new hard drives. That was another nail in WD's coffin for me.
Any updated experiences from WD's product line would be appreciated.
and (my personal favorite) the warning about how the strong magnet inside the system could fritz your pacemaker.
So you have a large number of workers exposed to this machine that (I presume) creates massive electromagnetic fields? And they are exposed to it for lengthy amounts of time in proximity to it? And you have other workers in the same area/facility that are not exposed to it?
...
I tire of the ongoing debate that electromagnetic fields are hazardous to your health. Since you provide these people ongoing health care, perhaps you could release anonymized data so we could either confirm or deny this? If anything it would help clear things up in -- not only the power lines debate -- but also maybe cellphones if the EMFs are in anyway similar.
Just a thought
My work here is dung.
> Given the critical importance of hard disk storage in all of our lives, we thought you might want a peek under that hood, too.
Careful... what if you open the hard disk and there's a mouse inside who's been remembering it all for you? Then he sees you and realizes "Oh, crap, we need to do the experiment all over. Vogons! Oh, Vogons! Where are you...."
And then. Will come. The poetry.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
"Given the critical importance of hard disk storage in all of our lives"
is the exact reason I have not bought a WD drive in 15 years, back in the 90's you couldn't get one of their products that wasnt crap
after replacing my 120 meg drive 3 times in a single year, and a few later had the same issue with the next wd drive, except 4 times through the rma horse crap, I swore to never buy their garbage again
been quite happy with seagate and maxtor, they make a quality product
as far as my old 120mb drive its long dead... as I recall it didnt last more than a year or 2 after the last replacement
but I still have my 240mb maxtor, and it still works just fine today
Wheres the giant pile of dead drives?
I've got one in both buildings here. And 80% of them are WD drives.
Well, all hard drives can fail sooner or later, and there's a reason for the M in MTBF. The problem with IBM Deathstars wasn't just that they failed (all do), but that their failure rate was disproportionately higher than any other brand at the time. And yeah, I had one of those fail on me too.
That said, I don't seem to have much of a problem with failing WD drives. I have a Raptor of each of the 75 GB, 150 GB and 300 GB varieties, all of them since that particular series was launched and all three still seem to chug along just fine. But that's a non-representative sample too, so don't take it as more than a personal anecdote.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This article [>]
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Unfortunately, it is spanned [>]
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Thus, I won't read it unless someone provides a print-link (please?).
p.s. Sorry... Tom's hardware really annoys me, I just felt I had to do it.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I worked in the Texas Instruments semiconductor fab shop in Sherman, TX for several years. Same sort of setup, different substrate (plus they don't have any etching processes). The bunny suits can get hot, but the sweat under the gloves make some work almost impossible. Try changing the battery in your watch wearing those plastic gloves and you'll see what I mean. Sometimes the gloves just have to come off; then you have to clean the work area thoroughly to decontaminate it (sodium in sweat was the biggest worry). One thing I'm curious about: vibration. We were in north Texas, and needed quite a bit of vibration control, mostly isolation pads. The article doesn't say where the WD facility is, I assume California. I see some isolation pads under equipment, but how do you handle vibration in a seismically active area?
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Their site just sputtered to a halt..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
How long until we have enough Hard Drive storage space to backup my own brain?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
... has everyone forgotten the dreaded Seagate 'stiction' problems? And those fun fixes? I was told they were due to contamination, but found out later, not so. But I banged my share of them around just to get them running long enough to copy off the data. Ah, Ghost.
Or the Miniscribe brick scandal, which not a quality control problem, illustrates how your favorite drive manufacturer can become a casualty of even bad accounting?
Is any drive manufacturer immune to problems? Nope.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The rash of 40GB HD failures (and it wasn't just W.D.) wasn't the hardware. In most cases it was because the entire 40GB was partitioned as One Big Drive... in FAT32, which was still the dominant filesystem for Windows.
The problem is that FAT32 has a bug that can cause data-wrapping if the partition is larger than 32GB. And the bug exactly mimics a failing HD -- random data loss, corrupted files.
The explanation used to be on Microsoft's tech site, but it vanished last time they nuked a bunch of older material (which they do periodically).
At any rate, you can see why there was a rash of "HD failures" when HDs exceeded 32GB. And W.D. took the brunt of this, since at the time they were the first (and for some time, the only) manufacturer offering a consumer HD larger than 32GB. By the time everyone else caught up, most of the Windows world had moved to NTFS, which does not have the bug, and the problem went away.
BTW not long after that, Seagate did a study on RMA'd drives, and found that about 60% of the time the hardware was fine, and the "failure" was in fact caused by a filesystem or software error. This is pretty much in line with my own experience.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
How I love the way they devoted one page for each paragraph! It feels so great to be forced to browse through all 41 pages just to read the entire article. The site is so user-friendly, that a print version is nowhere to be found.
It was funnier (and a bit scarier) when I read 'pens' as 'penis'. Took a lot of curiosity for me to click that link.
Solid state drives are sure to displace hard drives before too much longer. Complex mechanical mechanisms inevitably get pushed aside for solid state. In all liklihood WD will be relegated to reselling solid state drives, since they will never beat Intel, Micron etc. at fabbing silicon. I like WD just fine as a company, but they're in the same position as Kodak was in 1996 or so. The writing is on the wall.
Tom's Hardware got a tour of WD? I expect good reviews for WD gear on TH in the near future. .
I would not be surprised, they really had the ability to twist their tests some years ago when I last went there. I can't believe they where testing Nuendo performance by seeing how long it took to render the final project, when what really matters for anyone using the product was how many fx / synthesizers and audio tracks you can run in real time while working on the product. The final rendering took a very short time and is only done once (theoretically) when you are finished with the project. Of course the catch is that at the time Intel did very well in the final render, but very badly in the real work... I even sent them feedback regarding it, I was working in the field at the time and it really annoyed me...
I only skimmed the article, but when was the last harddrive you bought that was Made in USA?
BTW not long after that, Seagate did a study on RMA'd drives, and found that about 60% of the time the hardware was fine, and the "failure" was in fact caused by a filesystem or software error. This is pretty much in line with my own experience.
As someone who has RMA'd a Seagate drive I thought was failing because their SMART info uses one of the error counts as some kind of debug value (i.e., the drive is fine, but it shows millions of errors per minute), I would consider their data suspect.
http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/525-10-western-digital-tour.html
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I see your Seagate anecdote with one of my own.
I had a Seagate 500GB 7200.10 fail in September 2008 (crappy firmware edition), not long after installation after having sat on a shelf for a few months. When I approached Seagate to RMA the drive, they barely bothered to ask me what was wrong with it. Filled out a form, slapped it into a box, and back came the replacement, though a little less promptly than 3-7 days on the RMA form.
I'm at the point in life where I generally install a new OS onto a new disk drive, re-using older drives after *months* of successful operation on the new system / configuration. Spindles are cheap insurance at modern prices.
No vendor is immune from production glitches. I've been searching for the fountain of electronic youth for twenty years. No company, however great, is immune from a Toyota moment.
It amuses me how talismanic we tend to become on low sample sizes. Typical example: "I had a Brand X drive fail on me back in 2000, and haven't purchased another one since." Every vendor I've ever tried has fallen on its platter at least once, so I'm now back to pencil and paper.
What would make me happy is more binning from the drive manufacturer's. I like the middle bin between Joe consumer and Enterprise exabucks. It can't be that hard to look at production data and say "this batch is better than that batch" and bin accordingly.
I've heard that the external backup drives sold at Costco and places like that *are* sourced from batches not up to full warranty treatment. You'll notice these appliances have a shorter drive-life warranty than the same drive sold naked.
OTOH, it's hard for the average consumer to know for certain if you pay a $50 premium for the extra quality bin whether you're getting more quality, or just a different sticker. A web hosting facility is going to have the failure data to back up any decision making on paying a premium price.
Also, it's pretty easy for a careless consumer to compromise drive life by poor handling, installation, or faulty cooling. I'd guess about half of all failed drives (excepting DeathStar production sagas) suffered abuse at the hands of the retail chain or end user, which sets the limit on how much quality it makes sense for the vendors to promise.
However, if the consumer is playing a $50 sticker premium for a "black edition" disk drive, it's also likely the abuse level and cooling components are more carefully considers.
That would be a funny business model. The drive vendor sells exactly the same drives for $50 more, but the buyers who spring for the premium take so much better care of the drives, the drives gain a reputation for delivering higher reliability justifying the price.
To make this work, the vendor has to keep the supply of "black edition" drives to a relatively small trickle. Once the masses get their hands on them, the game is ruined.
One point the article doesn't mention is analyzing the platters under static load instead of dynamic load (including strain from spinning) and spindle vibration. I wonder how much that complicates quality control.
I've noticed that SMART sometimes shows ridiculous bogus values, that tend to indicate some sort of overflow condition in the software. Which still doesn't mean the physical part of the drive has failed.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Anyone have any first hand experience with WD's reliability as of late?" - by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15, @12:22PM (#31145856)
Yes, & since 1992 (& I still have several IDE HDD's from WD that STILL RUN from those days (Caviars, 212mb & 242mb)) - that's just a GOOD TESTIMONY here, to "start the show", so-to-speak (a great one no less).
That's been my experience w/ WD disks since the early 1990's in fact... still running, & imo? An AMAZING one...!
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Then, in late 2002/early 2003, I bought into their 10,000 rpm "Raptor" series since the 36gb model (2 of them for MIRRORING or RAID 0)... 1 of them went bad, shortly afterwards (around 6 months tops iirc).
No biggie though - WD replaced it, AND, w/ the LARGER & FASTER 74gb SATA I model no less & NO EXTRA CHARGE EITHER!
Then, because of that? I bought into the 150 "Raptor X" SATA I models (again 2 of them, & still part of the former round of Raptors on SATA I @ 10,000rpm)...
Again, 1 of the 2 went bad around 2 yrs. later (as a mirrored drive, RAID 1 etc. et al)...
(As an aside + some "pertinent data" here, as to HOW I use HDD's: I don't see any reason to think their disks are "bad", because a LOT of the work I do IS extremely "diskbound" much of the file in File I/O or DB work too)
SO - What did WD do to "make up for this" per their warranty?
Well - They sent me a FASTER 150gb SATA II "Viking" (just a smaller velociraptor really) as a replacement - which is an even (theoretically @ least) FASTER disk (SATA II vs. SATA I is why).
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Then, later (last year in fact) I bought into their SATA II 10,000 rpm "Velociraptor" HDD series (1 300mb unit ).
(This thing FLIES, & is reliable as it gets... & that's for a year++ or so, now, & running F A S T, & strong...)
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So - Of the 5 SATA I drives I bought? 2 went bad, but, nearly immediately on 1 (smaller 36gb unit)... but, WD backs their warranties to no end!
Again/E.G.-> WD sent me back the 74gb unit I am using TO THIS DAY NOW, almost 7++ yrs. later, as my backup HDD (to replace the smaller generation #1 36gb raptor I lost). I thought that was great - Heh, they DOUBLED THE SIZE OF THE DISK I SENT THEM IN FACT, & sent me one back that still works (way, Way, WAY past its warranty no less). Probably because they no longerp produced the 36gb, but I was happy, because the replacement's been running non-stop since 2004-2005 or so, just fine!
OVERALL - That was my experience on SATA I with them, a GOOD one.
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Now, on the "Raptor X's" SATA I??
I had one of the 2 I bought "go bad"... & what'd WD do?
Heh - they sent me back the SATA II "Viking" I am using now (also 150gb), which is a faster spec in SATA II than SATA I... & runs like a dream for a year++ now in fact.
(I.E.-> When a WD disk "goes belly up"? They do you RIGHT - AND, face it guys: Sooner or later, all HDD's do go on you... period)
WD does you right though, & just sends you one of equal size from the NEXT GENERATION no less (provided you are still in warranty of course, that goes w/out saying))
They back their products & warranties FULLY & to the letter, in other words, and you make out well imo, by getting a "next gen" & usually SUPERIOR replacement (& though they may be refurbs (not sure IF this is what WD does on replacements or not))... All in all, imo @ least, a good deal.
So, lastly: That's been my experience w/ their SATA II HDD "velociraptor" family - again, a good one!
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IN THE END - PUT IT THIS WAY: I intend to apply @ WD for work w/in the next year++ (they, or MS)... why? Because I believe in both families of computer products is why. I won't work for a company whose products I don't use & believe in, or one that won't back their merchandise & warranties (or build them as well as is possible eithe