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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."
I'm not sure about comparative reliability, but most WD drives come with a 5 year warranty nowadays, and their RMA process is the easiest i've seen. (I work at a repair shop, so we see a LOT of bad 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.
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?
Actually, they are. EM stands for Electro-Magnetic because the two are inseparably linked. You can't have magnetic fields without current or current without electricity. How do you think they create large magnetic fields anyway? Friggen AC posters.
cat sig >
I worked at Lucent Microelectronics in Allentown - not known to be a seismic area, true dat. However, the opto group in Breinigsville was right off of Rt. 222 and in the midst of a very busy beehive of distribution centers, with the concomitant truck traffic. Constant truck traffic. Neverending truck traffic.
All of the cleanrooms in Breinigsville were built on large springs to isolate them from the movement of the buildings; yes, the tractor trailers could affect them even though they were on a highway a good couple of hundred yards away.
And our sniffers in the Allentown MOS fabs could sense when a truck went by on Union Boulevard from the diesel particulates.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Sorry, a strong magnet does not an EMF field make. EMFs are about varying fields - an oscillating magnetic field produces an (also oscillating) electric field, and viceversa.
On top of that, the frequency of said oscillation not only determines the depth to which it penetrates the tissue, but is also vital to any biological effects, and that's where the argument about nonionizing radiation comes.
The current line of reasoning is more or less: the RF energy sure does not disrupt DNA since no matter how many quanta are hitting you, they are too weak to break the bonds involved; the remaining concern is whether the heat produced in the tissue when it absorbs the radiation can produce any harm over the years. The preliminary consensus so far is "unlikely", but you gotta be sure...
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
You can't have magnetic fields without current or current without electricity.
Wrong. Static magnetic fields do not induce any current in static wires, otherwise we'd have infinite free electricity. Read Maxwell's Equations.
And while elecrtricity and magnetism are inseperably linked to Electromagnetic Radiation, they are not the same. EM Radiation is a self-propogating wave composed of oscillating electric and magnetic fields. Neither a magnet nor constant DC current produce EM radiation. You are very, very wrong.
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Western Digital does one better - they will cross-ship a new drive if you need for only the cost of your return shipping to them. It's really handy when you have a drive kick up a pre-fail SMART error. You can get a new drive on the way before the old one fails and just do the swap out in the array. I've had to do it twice (out of 16 drives) for my home storage array over the years.