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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.
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.
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.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
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.