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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."
Look, if it were that big of an issue, you'd see headlines about people leaving the company and suing them and settling out of court for huge sums due to health issues.
You're not going to get brain cancer from talking on your damned cellphone. If you're afraid you are, then quit using one. If you're afraid of cell towers giving you cancer, check yourself into an asylum, because if that were the case you'd see cancer rates across the country rising by tens of thousands of percent, centered on those towers.
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'
... 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.
Anecdotally, every single manufacturer is having reliability problems; there's no one brand you can Just Count On. WD is included in that; I recently had a WD drive fail after just a few months. I wanted to know who to switch to, asked around, and there's just no answer.
The good news is that drives are big and cheap. Use software RAID1 and the worst drives combine to become very reliable storage. So that's my answer: buy the cheapest drives you can get, and use them in pairs or triplets. Even multiplying the price like that, they're great value.
If I were you I'd read the article to the end before writing. The last few photos show their SSD labs. Apparently they are well aware of the situation.
I'm sure this is purely anecdotal, but it's been my experience with WD drives that they either fail spectacularly within the first few months of operation or I can run them into the dirt over the course of 8+ years without a hiccup. Also, I've had nothing but fantastic experiences with their warranty processing department - their RMA program is quick and painless should I find myself with a dead drive still under warranty.
As an aside, as a SAN administrator I feel it important to point out that regardless who manufactures the drive: It's a matter of when, not if, the drive will fail. If the data retained on the drive is critical (business or personal), one must always be prepared for the eventual death of the drive and plan accordingly.