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."

Comments

Re:Hmm

[bakawolf]

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)

I don't seem to have any problem with them

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Dear WD, Could You Help Us End an EMF Debate?

[Bakkster]

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.