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

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[eldavojohn]

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 ...

well ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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

Re:well ...

[NotQuiteInsane]

The thing that cheesed me off most about the whole ordeal was that they issued a firmware "fix" that bricked the drives outright.

At that point I started to suspect their in-house testing checklist looked something like this:

1. Compile it.
2. Release to the customer.
3. ???
4. Profit!

I mean, seriously, it's a stinker of a bug, but there's a step missing between 1. and 2.: "Get a few hundred drives from the warehouse, do random number of R/Ws, image, set up for failure. Test to see if bug is fixed, also test for bricking / regressions / other issues". Screw the cost, get the engineers some drives from the warehouse, get a few from RMA that have failed, and let them do some testing.

The clincher was that the first firmware update didn't fix the whole issue: while the bricking could be considered a bigger problem, the update still didn't fix the bug -- you could get past the "bricking" with the serial console, but the drive would still crap itself when it saw the trashed SMART log record.

As for the whole RMA procedure, they made a colossal clusterfsck of it. The front-line staff didn't know a thing about the bug (even though it was on the knowledge base), and just played the "stonewalling game". As in, "it's a problem with your hardware, the drive is spinning so it's fine."

As was, the CSRs didn't know anything about the "firmware issue" (Seagate refused to call it a recall) until near the end, and SG themselves just kept making fuckup after fuckup until it all ballooned into one giant clusterfuck.

Given that they had their own in-house data recovery service, and that they knew how these drives were failing, they should have (at the VERY LEAST) offered to repair them free-of-charge regardless of warranty status. It's a firmware bug, thus it's Seagate's fault.

It seems a lot of "customer first" type policies have fallen by the wayside recently... Now it's pretty much "take the customer for all they're worth, and hope they don't tell their friends/the cops that we were naughty."

My opinion of Seagate was soured before the 7200.11 issues though -- I bought a 500GB 7200.10, which died within about 8 months. Basically, the motor locked up mid-spin, and (AFAICT) the motor control chip decided to slam on the brakes (short all 3 motor coils to ground -- aka dynamic braking). Big mistake. The drive launched itself across the floor (the cables were pretty loose) and nailed the side of my leg. It wasn't especially painful, but certainly brought me back into the "real world" (I was in the middle of a huge mess of coding).

The next morning I called Seagate, spoke to a really apathetic CSR who spoke to me like I was interrupting something far more important, and who couldn't give a flying crap in a storm about issuing an RMA number. During the 15-minute call, the CSR outright refused to escalate the call to a supervisor ("we have no supervisors here"), and just kept giving me the same answer time-and-again.

I gave up and called the company that sold me the drive (CCL Computers in Bradford). In 5 minutes I had an RMA number, and instructions for returning it. "It might take a week to get it tested, but we'll replace it if it's faulty."

Two days later I had a new drive sitting on my desk at work. Now *that* is customer service.

Looks familiar

[Sooner Boomer]

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?

Re:Looks familiar

[Reziac]

You can't wear thin cotton gloves under the "clean" gloves, to absorb sweat?? I'd think given all the thought that goes into making the bunny suits, they'd have some sort of sweat-wicking liners by now??

Re:Looks familiar

[HockeyPuck]

I see some isolation pads under equipment, but how do you handle vibration in a seismically active area?

I used to work in IBM's Storage group in SanJose, California. This facility used to manufacture disk drives and storage subsystems. One of the manufacturing buildings was actually built on rollers so that if an earthquake hit, the building would stay one in place while the ground moved underneath it. This wouldn't eliminate 100% of the motion, but would dampen it so that the equipment specific dampeners wouldn't have to handle the entire load.

anecdote deconstructed

[epine]

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.