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PC Makers Run Short of Popular Drives
Lucas123 writes "The impact from the monsoonal flooding in Thailand over the past three months is now being felt by users as computer system manufacturers are unable to meet supply needs. Lenovo told its corporate customers this week that is has run out of a number of drives including several types of 7200rpm and 5400rpm HDDs. 'Akin to the hysteria when banks defaulted in the 1930[s], PC orders across the industry are being placed for which HD supply does not exist,' a Lenovo rep wrote to his clients. IDC this week said the HDD shortages that have resulted from the flooding of four major Thailand industrial parks will likely be felt into 2013. Western Digital and Toshiba have been hit the hardest. PC shipments are also expected to fall short by 3.8 million units in the first quarter of 2012 due to component supply shortages. Meanwhile, there has been some indication of retail HDD price stabilization, but for some of the most popular hard drives prices continue to soar."
We're short on hard drives, and the factory workers are short on homes because of flooding.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
I might be wrong, but I feel, really feel like the flooding wasn't that big factor
but rather its great excuse to jack up the prices.
I remember similar story about RAM and Taiwan earthquake, when it was found out that damages to facilities were really minimal.
That's what they get for putting all (or most of) their eggs in one foreign basket.
I mean, sheesh. It's not like "single point of failure" is an unknown concept or anything.
...when you overly optimize for business friendliness. Perhaps moving everything to the Third World was a bad idea after all.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Might this shortage help spur interest in SSDs?
It's time to make the switch to better speed, performance and reliability.
Why isn't China in the hard drive business?
Isn't China one of the leading rare earth metals exporter at the moment?
size so there price will need to come down as well.
... because just before drive production went offline I finally outfitted my new home server with 9TB of storage for just $420. Pretty much my entire life, it's been that once I go and buy some computer hardware, two weeks (or however long the return period is) later, the price is guaranteed to be cut significantly (or a much better version is released).
Someone needs to check the alignment of the universe.
In unrelated news, my desktop's hard drive just failed 15 minutes ago. Fuck.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Banks only keep a portion of deposits on hand. This is standard regulated procedure called "Fractional Reserve Lending". No bank can return every despositers funds on demand at the same time. None of them. Anywhere.
When bank runs occur, there is a systemic lack of funds to meet demand due to fractional reserve lending.
This is simply not enough supply to meet demand, and not similar to failure of fractional reserve lending at all.
'Akin to the hysteria when banks defaulted in the 1930[s], PC orders across the industry are being placed for which HD supply does not exist,
This is not even remotely "akin".
Looking for a job in Portland, Oregon?
Western Digital has restarted HDD production in Thailand earlier than expected.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/12/02/western-digital-lifts-dec-qtr-view-restarts-thai-mfg-shrs-up/
My first computer had a 256Mb hard drive that stored the OS, applications, files, AND had room left to turn on virtual memory. And I had to walk uphill in the snow to buy floppy disks!
It used to be that if you didn't need a file any more you deleted it. If your disk filled up, you didn't just buy a new one. Aside from graphics, recording, and IT professionals, does anyone really need much more than a few hundred gigs? Or do that many people insist on digitizing their entire DVD library?
Western Digital has restarted HDD production in Thailand earlier than expected.
I'd definitely be a little careful about the first few batches of new drives that come off those assembly lines, considering all the decontamination, repair and re-calibration the flooded manufacturing equipment would have needed. Would be interesting to know if there's going to be a bump in their drive rate failure over the next few years for Western Digital, Hitachi, and Toshiba.
You are missing the fact that the well-to-do's spending on their toys far outstrips what they've been paying in income taxes, and especially since they are so masterful at hiding their income from the taxes. You also have to study the Fair Tax to know that no poor person pays a penny of Fair Tax. Also good to know is the fact the the income taxes are highly regressive, starting with 15.3% of the 1st dollar that the poor person makes, in the form of the payroll taxes (social security and medicare) and are further compounded by the hidden income tax in the price of all American-manufactured goods, which amounts to, on average, about 22% of the selling price of those goods. Add everything together, and the poor are being crushed by up to 37% taxes on their income right now. The Fair Tax would reduce that to zero via the mechanism of a prebate, which is essentially the gov't giving every social-security-number-carrying American enough money each month to pay the Fair Tax on income up to the poverty level. So, if you are making the poverty level, you pay no tax. If you are making less than the poverty level, you get a bit of a subsidy. If you are making millions, you're going to be sending millions to Washington when you buy your next $70 million dollar yacht.
As for the middle class taxes rising, my own taxes would fall about $2K, and at somewhat less than $100K income, I'm square in the middle of the middle class. The testimony of 2 Fair Tax experts before the house ways and means committee earlier this year stated the fact of the rich's spending outstripping the middle class's tax burden. It;s here:
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=252676
And if you go down to the bottom of that page, you can call up the video of the whole testimony and get those statements in real-time, on video. Unfortunately, I think that comes at about 1 hr and 36 minutes into the testimony, if I remember right.
Nothing. That's the point: giving the rich people a break and soaking the middle class.
This is an opportunity...
What will Microsoft et al do without a constant supply of itsy-bitsy hyper-overpriced drives to shove into consoles? Will they be forced to buy cheaper 1TB drives off the shelf of Walmart and partition them down to a size that sounds great to a gamer and laughable to everyone else?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Just the opposite.
As we get factories springing up like mushrooms across the land to employ the millions of unemployed, labor will become scarce, and competition for those workers will become more intense. Employers will have to offer good working condx in order to lure those that can weld, wire, pipefit, milwright, machine, etc. into their factories. If you want to see the extreme example of this, note the wooing of software developers with lavish campuses for workplaces that contain tennis courts and weight rooms and swimming pools and everything you could want in pleasant working conditions.
Helping that along _could_ be unions, if things were to go in the direction of medieval torture dungeon - UAW workers make more than $100K with overtime at time and a half, with Sundays at double time, all negotiated by the unions. That sort of protection can spread if need be, but if employers have learned anything at all, they won't abuse people to the extent that a majority of them would vote for a union.
And no, we don't need to completely remove environmental regulations, although getting a bit more reasonable might help a lot. Spending billions on the last 0.002% of some pollutant isn't necessarily cost effective if the misery caused by the economic recession resulting from most of our jobs moving overseas is more expensive to the American people.
If they end up paying zero taxes, its only because they've paid almost as much as the taxes to lawyers and accountants to guide their every move in the direction of least tax exposure. But the bottom line on that is that their products are very nearly as expensive as if they'd just paid the taxes, because of the necessity to pay those high-priced lawyers and accountants. The whole income tax system hurts the companies that either pay the taxes, or pay the lawyers/accountants to avoid paying the taxes, and its really expensive either way. We cannot have the highest labor rate on the planet and the 2nd-highest corporate income taxes on the planet and expect to compete.
What we should be doing is to try to make things as cheap for industry as we possibly can, so that there will be more profit and therefore more industry, which means employment will be more plentiful. Automation or not, the factories still need people to install those machines, repair those machines, move them around, wire them up, supply them with compressed air or hydraulic power or chemical supplies such as paint and so forth. While such factories won't employ the 1000's that factories of old did, we can still make it up on the volume by building many more factories.
And think of the boost to the global warming efforts to have AMERICAN factories which will, naturally, run on natural gas or wind, as most new electrical plants are gas-fired, and 100's of new electrical plants would be needed as 1000's of new factories are built, and this would TAKE AWAY the work from the factories in India and China, which are digging coal as fast as they can. We can get our energy from 1 carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms of the methane molecule, about as clean a deal CO2-wise as you can get with fossil fuels, and we will likely be the first to convert all that to solar and geothermal as soon as it makes economic senses to do so. Until then, we have oceans and oceans of natural gas, more than 50% more than the next-most-plentiful supply on the face of the earth, Russia.
The reindustrialization of America is a win on many fronts, but we're going to have to abolish the income taxes to make it happen.
Corporate tax happens on the SUPPLIERS to the corporation that are making the hard drives, too. It doesn't matter that the hard drive mfgr is only breaking even and paying no corporate income tax, he is in fact paying it in the elevated prices of all the components he buys from his various suppliers. Need a supply of raw material for casting hard drives? That will be supplied by a company making a profit, because if it wasn't, it'd be out of business. And, the HDD mfgr here will be paying the cost of that supplier's corporate income tax.
And if we want corporations here to make no profit just to avoid killing taxes, that is a killing philosophy that has already sent most of our jobs overseas, esp. the blue-collar jobs.
Why not seek to allow corporations every chance possible to make money in America? If that works, we should be up to our ears in newly-employed people. Right now, our unemployment compensation is costing the US Gov't, or more precisely "the rest of us", $100 million a year. Food stamps come in at $70 million a year. Those expenses could be brought down considerably if we could have several 10's of 1000's of new factories, and therefore new jobs, that would enable people that can weld and wire and install and maintain machinery in factories to get off that sort of gov't assistance. Growing the economy has to happen, or we're going to go bankrupt, I believe.
since I can't find a delete I need to appoligize for my outburst. I was in [and still am] in a kind of shock you only feel when you realize you didn't plan ahead and lost almost 6 TB worth of data that I have accumilated over the years, all my programs sources, old websites I have done, all my games, mp3s, movies, dvd/blu-ray rips [that can take an hour + each to rip :(:(:(:(:(:(:(] But where does one backup THAT much data?
Anyway sorry for the outburst, I am sorry if anyone took the time to read my post.
My array is 3TB. I have another system with a 3TB drive that I rsync a copy of it to regularly. Something like that sounds like the ticket for you.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
But where does one backup THAT much data?
Well, I'm sorry to hear that the 0 in Raid 0 refers to the amount of data you'll get back when something goes wrong. :/
I did want to answer your question, though, as I've encountered this myself. I have too many gigs of data to easiliy back up. One of the things I've done is organize things a bit. For example, I have some data I'll likely not need for several years, if ever. I have that all compressed. I call this the 'Archive Data'. Every so often I dump all this data to a cheap external drive and throw it in the closet somewhere.
Then I've got data I need a little more urgently, I call it the 'Active Data'. It gets backed up once a week on a drive that stays on all the time. During this backup, the 'Archive Data' folder is skipped. This dramatically reduces how much space I really need for a backup, and it speeds the process up quite a bit so I'm more likely to do it frequently.
Finally , and I should have mentioned this sooner, but everything I do is organized by 'project'. That project could be "2009 taxes' or "Beach Photoshoot' and so on. That 2009 Taxes folder? Yeah I can compress that and throw that into Archive. The point is that you keep the actual amount of data you need to keep backed up in a much smaller space. I mean 6 TB won't even fit on one drive!
Oh, I do have one other suggestion. I have a few DVD rips myself. But I don't back those up provided I still have the original media. Yeah, it takes a long time rip them, but I don't care about them when I've got old bits of work I need to keep handy in case I go job searching again.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
or you are just the unlucky person.
i have never ever had any seagate die on me at ANY point in the last 10 years. not only that, i just had removed a 75 gb seagate drive - one which i forgot when i started using - it may be approx 6 years or more. and from that point on that disk kept spinning while hosting oses on it that changed over time - windowses, linuxes, this that. it had programs and games installed on it too. and it was quite silent even after it was 6 years old, still running well. i removed it, because i replaced it with a ssd.
and even as of now, that disk sits in a drawer, with the image of my ssd which has all oses and programs installed on it as of this moment. if i have any problems, i can just plug in that drive and keep working.
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How do you back up 6tb of data? With three 2tb hard drives. Even at today's prices, that's as little as $425 off the shelf at Best Buy (including tax) for three external USB2/3 drives. And RAID 0 for the only copy of your life's work? Come on, dude. Just...come on.
I hope you learned how to properly evaluate the value of your data and that you need to take reasonable steps to protect it.
BTW, break of a Jackson or three and buy yourself a 32-64 gig USB stick to store encrypted copies of the most "can't live without" data you have. Tax returns, family photos, etc. I have a tiny Patriot Flex hanging on my keychain with that stuff and larger caches on my netbook and notebook. Having a Big Ass Array (brought to you by Carl's Jr.) doesn't do much good if the building burns down.
Also, there are data recovery services that can get data from a broken array. They're expensive but they exist.
Here in Australia we just getting over the price hike from the flooding in QLD that caused the price of Bananas to go through the roof, that I could live with but this is insane!
1. Income tax is progressive tax, consumption tax is regressive. That's by definition. The entire point of income tax is to tax the rich more than the poor - the point is to tax disposable income, not basic survival income.
2. People with lots of income can very easily sidestep any consumption tax. They just buy their $2m yachts in South Africa or Swaziland or Barbados.
Simply put, if you do not tax income, you tax nothing. Most of the ultrarich do not spend the money. They just roll it over into some other investment. If you "make" $200m a year, you simply cannot easily spend that much.
So yes, you can have your "fair tax" and crap like that. All you will get is any income over $100-$200k will never get taxed, ever. And you'll get a lot more cars registered in Mexico on American roads. Especially the luxury and exotic cars.
So let me get this straight, you had a multi-drive RAID0 array and you are upset that it crashed? Do actually know anything about hard drive reliability rates? Well, you do now.
RAID was invented for a reason. Controllers support hot spares for a reason.
Lesson for next time. Go with RAID5 or RAID6 and eat the loss of capacity. Parity is worth it. Granted, RAID is not a backup strategy but RAID0 is just a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. You will have a drive failure. It is inevitable.
Or just build a few hard drive factories in countries other than Thailand.
With the prebate program in effect, those earning less than $15,000 per year would see their share of the federal tax burden drop from -0.7 percent to -6.3 percent. Of course, if the poorest Americans are paying less under the FairTax plan, then someone else pays more. As it turns out, according to the Treasury Department, “someone else” is everybody earning between $15,000 and $200,000 per year.
Which seems to contradict your statement about saving money until you look at this graph, which includes payroll taxes. So, yes, someone like you making more than $74,000 would save money. As would someone making less than $24,000. However, the $24,000 - $74,000 group (let's call them the lower-middle class) are the ones paying for it. That doesn't sit well with me.
Moreover, I'm not convinced that abolishing corporate taxes would bring all those American manufacturing jobs streaming back. For something like software development, where you'd be paying a high wage to your employees no matter where you were located, sure. But manufacturing? Even with 0% corporate taxes, American labor still costs a hell of a lot more than Chinese or Thai labor.
You do realize that even if you call it a "prebate", you're not getting a basic income program past the current crop of right-wing nutjobs, right? They'd say that you're giving Cadillacs to welfare queens, and that would be the end of it.
Though I have to admit, they would probably be super okay with a flat 20-ish percent tax on their "toys" if you got rid of the capital gains and income taxes entirely; after all, toys can be bought overseas.
All hard drives are prone to failure. Sometimes you get lucky and find some that run for 5 years or more, and sometimes not. Back in the old days, I thought the WD Caviar was a terrible model, but now it seems to be good. I like Seagate in general, but I did have two drives with a chirping problem. I'm running on two Samsung drives now that seem a little slow, but reliable.
Backup considerations really need to come first. I only have 500 megs of data, so I run an automatic Ghost image each night. But with 6 TB, I would cut it in half and make do with 3 TB, mirrored.
i have used around 3-4 seagate drives in the last decade, recommended/bought everyone else seagate drives, anyone i know here almost exclusively uses seagate drives (they sell like hotcakes in turkey, almost every build has seagate), and the times i can remember hearing someone say 'drive died on me' are the times with quantum brand drives, and thats a looong era in the past. (early to mid 1990s).
neither in forums nor among acquaintances i hear people say 'drive died on me'. a lot of people may be even thinking hard drives dont die.
problems you mention may be relevant to bigger than 1 tb drives, teething problems. and the mobos to support them - my new 990fx gigabyte mobo proudly boasts that it can support 3 tb drives, for example.
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didn't start out that way :( And it wasn't actually raid0, it was more like I built my media center with a 1TB drive, everything went high-def, needed more space to store my tv shows and stuff so I kept adding another 2 TB as dynamic drives to the pool until I added the last drive and started to worry. I really DID want to back it up and redo it but I didn't have enough space on the rest of my network to backup everything [not many people have a spare 6TB just laying there :(] And then this goddamn flood drove the 2TB drives to over 300 bucks each and I was like, I'll wait until they come back down, and well... poof its gone.
My real big loss is about 25 virtual machines which I can not get back, the other stuff I can re-rip or whatever. But the hours lost alone suck, I really wish I had not posted but it just was like you have got to be kidding me, I'm reading about hard drives and poof a 2TB drive dies on me that same very instant [could have been 6 minutes earlier as that is what I have my system watcher poll] but now its there and there is nothing I can do about it. Worse than drunk texting I would think,
I realize everyone's piling on to you for using RAID 0, but they're absolutely right. Think of this way: Hard drives are one of the most common failure points for any PC. This shouldn't be surprising--moving parts bring into play all sorts of wear and tear issues that simply cannot be avoided in the long-enough term future. But when you set up a RAID array, you're courting trouble because each drive significantly increases your potential points of failure. If you have 6 drives, and each one has a 90% chance to be functioning properly at the 3 year mark, that's 47% chance that at least *one* will fail in that time frame. And with a non-parity raid setup, all it takes is one failure to cost you everything. Striped raid is great for increasing your speed and storage, but it comes at a huge reliability cost. Next time, assign one drive to parity and you'll be much, much safer. Even if one 1 failing is a likely event, 2 failing simultaneously will be very unlikely.
I'm sure its *a* factor, at least--but yeah, there's probably some price fixing going on as well using the flood as cover.
I was told in an electronics store that there are supply problems with digital cameras as well. The Canon S100 was supposed to be a big Christmas hit. Amazon in the country where I live has already warned that it will probably not be available until next year.
Good news for some of the competitors models. So I don't think that this is just price jacking . . . Canon would love to sell these, but can't.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Any tax scheme that pisses off the lobbyists wont fly.
If for no other reason, corporate personhood seems like an excellent reason to keep taxing corporations. After all, if they have all the benefits (plus some) of being a citizen, they might as well pay for it like everyone else.
if only there was some sort of technology that could elevate the extremely high value factory above any sort of flood. i think i have the solution. i call it a 'hill'
all i have left in SATA drives is a single 80Gb and that one is going in the new quad i'm building my GF for Xmas. All she does is FB and IM anyway so 80Gb with win 7 HP will be just perfect for her.
Not Linux? Do you just not love her or is this some S+M thing you two are into?
You might be able to recover some of the data. You must not make any changes to any of the drives.
If the failure is not bad - you don't hear weird noises from the drive, and you can still read most of the sectors from the drive, then you can make a clone of the drive to a new drive. Then put it into the array and try to copy the most precious stuff to you, especially stuff that cannot be easily recreated again to somewhere else.
If the failure is bad, you may have to spend $$$$ to get help from data recovery experts.
It will break before you outgrow it. That's what the statistics predict anyway. HDDs tend to have a much longer MTBF than SSDs, so you may want to take extra care of those backups.
SSDs MLC technology needs bigger die sizes to remain reliable, or smaller die sizes to remain cheap. Pricing of SSD won't come down that fast, until they come up with affordable new technologies for storing data that are not SLC/MLC flash. There are several technologies that are almost ready for production, but it will be a while before they have proven themselves in the field and have significant market penetration.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
What would be a nice to see: Global movement to help Thais get back on their feet.
What will actually happen: Drive manufacturers scream jackpot as visions of twenty years of price fixing begins. Self-involved consumers look everywhere for someone to shut-up and take their money.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
What you're missing is that that's exactly what the FairTax folks want.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Lets talk American labor. The auto companies said, all over the news programs when they were going bankrupt a few years ago, that their labor rate is $78 / hr. That's because of all the benefits and the retirees' expenses. And here:
http://www.mt-online.com/component/content/article/40-january2009/85-uptime-lessons-from-auto-manufacturing.html?directory=90
we learn that it takes 30 - 33 labor hours for the big 3 here to build a car. That's about $2500 in labor.
The Fair Tax people, long before this article came out, have calcualted that, on average, about 22% of the price of all American goods is composed of income tax expenses incurred by American companies manufacturing things here. That's corporate income tax, employees' individual income tax that makes their labor more expensive, that also includes the payroll tax that the employees pay at 15.3% for medicare and social security that again, makes their labor more expensive, the embedded income taxes in all their raw materials and machine tools and everything else they buy, and so forth.
Imagine now a $40K SUV. It is reasonable to expect that the embedded income tax expense is around $8800. Compare that with the $2500 that goes into the labor of building the $40K SUV. An SUV would get dramatically cheaper with income tax gone as opposed to making slaves of all the workforce and shafting the retirees of all their pay.
As for the manufacturing coming back, a survey commissioned by Bill Archer, former house ways and means chair, asked 500 foreign CEO's what their reaction would be if the USA passed the Fair Tax. 400 of them said they would build their next factory in the USA. The other 100 said they would move their company HQ to the USA.
http://www.examiner.com/finance-examiner-in-national/survey-shows-that-companies-would-create-jobs-us-if-fair-tax-was-instituted?render=print
As for the Factcheck people, imagine how long they took to consider this question, and then note the testimony of 2 PHD economists familiar with the Fair Tax before the house ways and means committee earlier this year:
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=252676
If you scroll down to the bottom, bring up the video, and jump to the 1 hr and 36 minute mark, you find that these economists, under oath and threat of perjury, have testified that everyone's lifetime tax outlook goes down EXCEPT the very rich, who will pay more than they have been paying, because the Fair Tax hits them harder because of all their spending outstripping what their current tax burden is, which is greatly avoided through loopholes that they're very good at exploiting.
These PHD's have spent quite a lot of effort modeling the Fair Tax, and I am much more likely to take what they say about the Fair Tax bringing back prosperity rather than a website like FactCheck who, again, likely considered this for a couple days to a week.
And although the economists didn't say explicitly, imagine how many rich just don't have income taxes because they don't work. They sit around and break off a piece of cash from a very large pile of it that belongs to them and live on that each year, as well as the taxes on capital gains which is necessarily much lower than the income tax rates, or you'll kill invenstment if you try to raise them.
And that's the point - the income taxes are and have been killing the US industry for 50 years, ever since the US lost its consumer electronics to Japan starting in the 60's, and are losing the intellectual employment to places like India even today. When it _all_ goes overseas, we'll have just the thing that absolutely MUST be
The right wing are mostly the ones supporting the Fair Tax. Its the left that seem to be dragging their feet. Hey, don't ask me... maybe they want their constituency to remain poor and looking to them for gov't help?
The "they" in corporate personhood still drills down to the employees paying those taxes through lower wages and the customers paying those taxes through higher prices, and the stockholders paying those taxes through lower dividends. And, all those people are us.
dvd/blu-ray rips [that can take an hour + each to rip :(:(:(:(:(:(:(]
I was about to feel sorry for you but LOL, if that's the saddest moment you can't have lost much. Backup the stuff you've made yourself, family photos and all that other shit and if you lose a DVD/BluRay rip, go get it off TPB or something. Seriously. Personally I have three stages. Most is backed up by nothing, stuff I can rip again or download again. The more important stuff is on two physical HDDs (just copy-pasted, not RAID), it'll protect against single disk failure. Finally the really important stuff is also backed up at my parent's place, in case of fire, my whole machine getting stolen or whatever else disaster should strike here.
I screwed up bad with RAID5 once, lost the entire array because of one dead disk and one flaky disk that'd fail on every rebuild. Now I do JBOD and copy-paste, if you don't need high availability then it's actually not a bad backup method. Easy to understand, no software required. For things that are incremental like photos you don't need a version control, if it's tiny then just do date stamped folders and full copies. No stress at all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My company makes electric wires (some of the stuff we make go into hard drive motors) and we were hit badly by the flood. We were lucky that we aren't located inside an industrial park so we started going into the factory to recover our machinery on the week that we got flooded, even though the water was chest high. The industrial parks were closed for months before anyone are allowed back in.
It's been 50 days since we were flooded and the entire compound is now dry, but since every piece of machinery is damaged (roughly US$10 million loss) it may take up to three months before we can start production and six months or more before we can go back to the original production capacity.
We were interviewed by Taiwanese TV here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z62rHpW3mgg
Yup - like Philippines, or Mongolia.
Income taxes are not progressive. Poor people pay 15.3% of EVERY dollar they earn to the social security and medicare payroll taxes, while those taxes have a cap so that the rich do not. That is incredibly regressive. Also, income taxes embedded in the US cost of doing business here are responsible for about 22% of the price of all goods manufactured here being composed of income taxes, which are paid at 22% by the poor as well as 22% by the rich. We are really hammering poor people at tax rates up to 37.3%, which would totally go away under the consumption tax known as the Fair Tax.
People buying goods overseas still owe the tax, and a $70M yact is a whole lot harder to conceal than a Swiss bank account.
You are simply wrong about the rich not spending their money. Who do you think are buying those $10M mansions and $70M yachts like John Kerry's?
I've forgotten where I read that, but the figure is about 75% of the tax expense is paid to lawyers and accountants to avoid paying the tax.
I'm not even going to comment on your "don't buy Seagate" diatribe either, because it's opinionated bullshit. The reality of the situation is that everyone's experiences differ. [..] Failure rates for all brands are about the same. [..] There are two brands I boycott because of preposterously high failure rates within our company (Fujitsu SCSI U320 drives), and absolutely what-the-fuck-were-you-thinking firmware bugs (Samsung drives). Those are the only two I tell people to avoid, otherwise buy whatever makes you feel better about yourself.
So in other words, *his* recommendation to avoid Seagate based on several failures is "opinionated bullshit", but you feel quite entitled to tell us to avoid Fujitsu drives based on *your* bad experience. Despite this contradicting what you said that "failure rates for all brands are about the same".
Apparently you weren't around for the days when WD had massive (tens of thousands) batches of drives being packed/shipped which had head alignment problems back in the late 90s, and the same with Maxtor (though the problem was different). Who's "good" and who's "bad" changes all the time.
Actually, I would have said the same thing- all hard drive companies seem to go through good and bad phases, and I certainly wouldn't recommend (e.g.) Seagate simply because they were quite good a few years back.
Still, from a mixture of personal experience and what I've heard from others, it seems that Seagate *is* going through a particularly bad phase in terms of reliability at present. (It might just be coincidence, but I was quite wary when Seagate took over Maxtor a few years back, as the latter never had the best reputation for reliability and it was likely that drives produced at former-Maxtor facilities would probably be sold as Seagates. And it seems to have been around then that Seagate entered their current phase).
How do you deal with it? BY HAVING BACKUPS.
Have to agree with this one though. There's no hard drive manufacturer reliable enough that one should ever *not* have backups for valued data. And much as I don't want to come over as taking self-righteous easy shots at the OP (he's already been punished for his mistake), anyone who knows enough to be running RAID-0 knows- or should know- the nature of the beast. Namely that it significantly *increases* the risk of total loss from drive failure, which is always a possibility, regardless of drive brand. Even if Seagate are crap, they're not entirely to blame here, and I'm still trying to figure out what he was expecting.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Seems like a huge opportunity for SSD vendors? We've got a number of projects coming up that require hundreds of new workstations and we're already struggling with getting equipment. I'd gladly pay more per machine to avoid delaying these projects, and end up with better performance as well.
I often say that hard drives on off-the-shelf computers are like tires on cars: They sell them with the cheapest bargain-basement shit they can get their greedy little hands on. And the 5400RPM drive is the knockoff-brand all-season of hard drives.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"Simply put, if you do not tax income, you tax nothing."
Spoken like a true idiot that has never had to work a retail job in their life.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Murphy must have had an off-day. If Murphy succeeds then two drives within a single RAID-5 set would have failed..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Exactly. Drive failure rates are around 3%/year so with a N-drive RAID0 your failure rate goes to N*3%/year.
You gambled and you lost.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Just be glad that you learned this lesson with your data, and some company's. We've all been through it at one point or another. I've never lost multiple terabytes, but that's because I learned the hard drive reliability lesson in the early 1990s.
I had a 1TB Seagate drive start throwing SMART errors after 4 years (it was actually an RMA replacement for a Seagate that was giving problems within a month or two of installation) and just sent it in for RMA. I'm kind of curious if they'll start offering cash instead of hard drives at some point or if I can look forward to a coupon for a drive at some future date. Even more fun is that I had a 1 yr old Western Digital Caviar Black at work start going out (it's so much fun backing up 100 gigs of data when the drive transfer rate stutters along for a 2-4 MB/sec average) and their LifeGuard tool keeps telling me the drive passed, even though there's a queue of sectors to reallocate and it'll take a week (literally, 192 hrs) to do the extended tests at the scan rate it's getting.
It's also called market failure. Risk of single-point-of-failure disaster was an externality that now everyone now has to pay for but was not priced into the product up front.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Or one could more tightly integrate the IRS with the DoD, while making tax avoidance and corporate/economic scuttling(as practiced by those that deny prosperity - through tax evasion and hiring freezes - until they get their political will) an act of terrorism.
There is no part of the world the US's military cant go and no person they cannot repatriate. Say what you will, but when one wishes to destroy the US economy by threats or acts of offshoring, the US government is obligated to act to halt such activity without regard to jurisdiction.
You can have that when you have businesses committing to a long term (50+ year) presence in good faith and hiring people as-is in the US under the same terms. Otherwise those tax cut promises are empty words.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Assess taxes on the spot for foreign owned assets, with strict penalties. Your exotic car becomes a liability for you, and an opportunity for the US to seize it.
Same thing for yachts - if it has a foreign flag, be prepared to pay tons for the privlege. Even if you think you can hide in international waters.
Enforce the tax law with zeal and indifference to influence. Then make sure loopholes are closed, and the accountants that find them punished.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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Now is probably the right time to sell that stash of old HDDs laying around. You might actually get close to what you originally paid for them!