Fair enough. The company is Webdyne (you can google it). They produce(d?) an annoying little box that acted as a ftp(why do all water guys think ftp is the greatest invention ever?) gateway that would query devices on a Wavenis network. The protocol itself is fairly straightforward, and I would have preferred to implement it myself directly, but they would not give me that functionality. The gateway ran linux, but they provided no way to upload any modified code to the box, and refused to give the admin password. They were particularly unhelpful, and I do have an archive of my correspondence with them.
I no longer deal with them in any way, so I don't know if they are still selling the fatally flawed product. Forgive? Maybe, but they would have to prove their solution at their cost if they ever wanted to do business with me again.
I don't normally name and shame. I am the worst of customers - I quietly leave for other suppliers and you don't know I am gone. So, in a way I did surrender. I surrendered my business to a German company... I guess it would be more awkward for them if I informed them of this...
I had a fun one with a nameless companies "gateway" onto a wireless network. You could write a repeater path onto the gateway, but if any of the addresses contained a 0xFF byte (most did) the gateway would write 0x0F. It took a while to track down as I had to use an external tool to read everything back, and when I reported it to the nameless company, they informed me they were "too busy" to fix it. This is about when I learned to swear in french again.
I have exactly one of those disks left in a BSD box running ZFS. It is only a matter of time I suppose.... At least SMART gave me warning the others failed.
Surprisingly, no. We specified the SSD version of the PC (that runs on 24V incidentally) since we were concerned the motion of the door the device is mounted in might cause a spinning disk problems. Nobody ever turns off anything before messing with it. I suppose there is a possibility that they killed power while the damn thing was writing, come to think of it.
I would imagine, yes, if they failed a lot, you would find yourself having to re-label SSDs all the time.
The 3TB seagates are terrible. For a panel pc, though we have had a lot of success with 2.5" 500Gb spinning disks (seagate mainly, but some western digital).
We have not had much luck with the ones we have tried (we had some OCZ and ADATA as well as I think an intel or two.). They generally land in fairly varied environments, but we have not used them for around 2 years now as a result.
Spinning disks work fine. We thought SSDs would be better because of the possibility the system could be subject to vibration. Performance was never a concern. The use case includes some fairly continuous logging, but it was not expected that log would rotate very quickly.
RAID arrays are a little tight in panel PCs. Speed was never a huge issue, it was a case of reliability in environments where we feared spinning disks would not do well.
They were fairly small. They came with the panel pcs, and we had assumed they would be better due to vibrations that might occur in these environments. All failures were either the drive became unreliable (writes failed) or the controller failed, and the drive was not accessible.
These are not situations where such a low lifespan is acceptable. Maybe we got a bad batch, but there shouldn't be batches like this.
This is my point - in an industrial environment, I can't afford a 3 month later failure. They may have improved things, but a spinning disk is a safer proposition.
Thanks for the non attacking and informative answer.
I had controller failures on the "industrial" models we used. They just seem like a bad proposition right now. 0 failures on the spinning disk, but I will give it a few years.
We sent out some panel pcs with SSDs in them, and so far we have had to replace them all with spinning disks... When is the reliability and write limitation issue going to be solved?
It's basically a couple of harmonic drives made with plastic. These can be practical and fairly strong as well as compact. I know of one use for one in the aerospace industry, which I probably should not post about(the use, not the gearbox).
The metallic harmonic harmonic gearbox we are using works very well. It does not have such an extreme ration (I forget the exact ratio), but it is very strong and compact for what it does.
I might be missing something here, but I run a small BSD ZFS file server with samba and the little PC it runs on only has 2Gb or RAM. I am not doing anything more complex than a simple mirror (I have backups, the mirror is for availability), the equivalent of RAID 1+0, and sure caching is off, but performance is fine for the 6 people that use it(some even running their virtual machines off it, though I try to discourage that). What am I missing?
Slashdot Mirror
One allows "responsible" advertising until it annoys you. Then it goes. The point being that adverts should be helpful not annoying.
Fair enough. The company is Webdyne (you can google it). They produce(d?) an annoying little box that acted as a ftp(why do all water guys think ftp is the greatest invention ever?) gateway that would query devices on a Wavenis network. The protocol itself is fairly straightforward, and I would have preferred to implement it myself directly, but they would not give me that functionality. The gateway ran linux, but they provided no way to upload any modified code to the box, and refused to give the admin password. They were particularly unhelpful, and I do have an archive of my correspondence with them.
I no longer deal with them in any way, so I don't know if they are still selling the fatally flawed product. Forgive? Maybe, but they would have to prove their solution at their cost if they ever wanted to do business with me again.
I don't normally name and shame. I am the worst of customers - I quietly leave for other suppliers and you don't know I am gone. So, in a way I did surrender. I surrendered my business to a German company... I guess it would be more awkward for them if I informed them of this...
I had a fun one with a nameless companies "gateway" onto a wireless network. You could write a repeater path onto the gateway, but if any of the addresses contained a 0xFF byte (most did) the gateway would write 0x0F. It took a while to track down as I had to use an external tool to read everything back, and when I reported it to the nameless company, they informed me they were "too busy" to fix it. This is about when I learned to swear in french again.
Replied to wrong post. Should be attached to the parent.
I dunno. Not taking sides, but your sarcasm detector might be broken?
Simple solution: For work, use google and get optimised results.
For whatever else you search (weird pr0n, I assume, it is always weird pr0n): use duck duck go and you won't (hopefully) be tracked.
I have no fear.
You should get some cough mixture for that cough. It sounds terrible.
Perhaps, but it is not necessarily the case that I can gamble with tech that has let me down.
I have exactly one of those disks left in a BSD box running ZFS. It is only a matter of time I suppose.... At least SMART gave me warning the others failed.
Surprisingly, no. We specified the SSD version of the PC (that runs on 24V incidentally) since we were concerned the motion of the door the device is mounted in might cause a spinning disk problems. Nobody ever turns off anything before messing with it. I suppose there is a possibility that they killed power while the damn thing was writing, come to think of it.
I would imagine, yes, if they failed a lot, you would find yourself having to re-label SSDs all the time.
The 3TB seagates are terrible. For a panel pc, though we have had a lot of success with 2.5" 500Gb spinning disks (seagate mainly, but some western digital).
We have not had much luck with the ones we have tried (we had some OCZ and ADATA as well as I think an intel or two.). They generally land in fairly varied environments, but we have not used them for around 2 years now as a result.
Spinning disks work fine. We thought SSDs would be better because of the possibility the system could be subject to vibration. Performance was never a concern. The use case includes some fairly continuous logging, but it was not expected that log would rotate very quickly.
I did not choose the SSDs. They came with the industrial panel pc and were marketed as industrial grade.
ADATA, if I recall. I could dig up the failed ones somewhere.
Not never, but we have had no comebacks so far - including systems that predate the SSD debacle. These are 2.5" disks if that makes any difference.
RAID arrays are a little tight in panel PCs. Speed was never a huge issue, it was a case of reliability in environments where we feared spinning disks would not do well.
They were fairly small. They came with the panel pcs, and we had assumed they would be better due to vibrations that might occur in these environments. All failures were either the drive became unreliable (writes failed) or the controller failed, and the drive was not accessible.
These are not situations where such a low lifespan is acceptable. Maybe we got a bad batch, but there shouldn't be batches like this.
This is my point - in an industrial environment, I can't afford a 3 month later failure. They may have improved things, but a spinning disk is a safer proposition.
Thanks for the non attacking and informative answer.
I had controller failures on the "industrial" models we used. They just seem like a bad proposition right now. 0 failures on the spinning disk, but I will give it a few years.
We sent out some panel pcs with SSDs in them, and so far we have had to replace them all with spinning disks... When is the reliability and write limitation issue going to be solved?
It's basically a couple of harmonic drives made with plastic. These can be practical and fairly strong as well as compact. I know of one use for one in the aerospace industry, which I probably should not post about(the use, not the gearbox).
The metallic harmonic harmonic gearbox we are using works very well. It does not have such an extreme ration (I forget the exact ratio), but it is very strong and compact for what it does.
I might be missing something here, but I run a small BSD ZFS file server with samba and the little PC it runs on only has 2Gb or RAM. I am not doing anything more complex than a simple mirror (I have backups, the mirror is for availability), the equivalent of RAID 1+0, and sure caching is off, but performance is fine for the 6 people that use it(some even running their virtual machines off it, though I try to discourage that). What am I missing?
Dude, I haven't seen you, but I am pretty sure you can do better...
If you must, buy a cafe in france with cheese, like Rene Artois..