You're correct, I've read the same article. It was from the Anandtech tour of an Nvidia plant I'm 99% sure. They looked at a pre-fab lab and had a large IKOS box there that they were emulating the NV30 core on at about 1/10000 or lower speed ratio. Article is located here on Anandtech.
Basically what it boils down to is it would work great for lower performance applicatons like sound and such, but would fail miserably at any higher demand applications such as video processor.
For me it was 2001 - how a boring piece of crap ever made it out of the cutting room in the first place is beyond me. I would've been absolutely TOTALLY lost had I not read the book several times before I watched it. Now I'm not really a fan of being hit over the head with the plot, but I at least like to know what's going on without having to first know the plot already or being required to spend 10 weeks in meditation to figure it out!
I did finish HS, although bored out of my skull and then some. Went to a little college, found it unbelievably boring and way too much like a "big kids' high school". And I've several times run into the you don't have a degree get out of my office attitude, although that's starting to change quite a bit from what I see. A lot of IT managers (at least the ones with more brains than the chair they sit on) are realizing that most college-trained CS-wielding code monkeys these days have absolutely no interest in computers and therefore are basically unable to pick up anything new or be able to think even remotely outside the box without a class to teach them how. Several managers I've worked with actually were beginning to not even look at degrees (one guy as far as having his secretary black marker the education section of all incoming resumes!). They're finding out that formal education is NOT the only game in town, and that many times self educated coders are far superior to formally educated ones. After all, if you learned it all yourself, obviously you were interested AND motivated enough to digest it and understand it all without a teacher/boss telling you to.
damn it's late...hope at least a little of this makes sense;)
I don't know about you, but I don't consider the position of "random caller on the phone" to be a position of trust. In fact just the opposite, seeing all the telemarketing and scams that have gone on in the past 50 years or so. So in reality, he wasn't in a position of trust, such as corporate IT or something similar who is explicitly given the trust and responsibility, but was incorrectly given implicit trust based on who the caller assumed he was.
I agree, it's not right, but I would place more responsibility on the other end of the phone. If you have something you want secured, do you put it in a prefab plywood shed out back and give the key to the neighborhood paperboy?
Yeah what you're describing is known as "stiction". Happens when the lubrication on the platters gets old and sometimes begins to break down. The heads will stick to the platters in the park position and prevent the motor from being able to spin. By knocking the drive, that frees the heads and the motor can turn again and raise the heads.
Trust me, the more you know about them, the more you see it's a miracle they operate in the first place;) Sometime I'll write an overview of how the heads and servo controller know where your data is on the drive - it's pretty insane and a hell of a lot of guesswork...
Sounds like you're on the right track. The drives do have pretty tight undercurrent protection, and will do exactly what you describe when not getting enough juice. I'f you're running anything under a 300 watt with more than 1 other drive in the system (and I'd doubt you're running anything over a 250 with the system you describe) then it's rather likely that's what's going on. Although to be sure I would suggest hooking it up to another computer and running some diags on it just to be safe. As I've said before, IANAFAE (I Am Not A Failure Analysis Engineer):)
Well I don't have TOO much info to that end, but what I was able to get from one of our people in sales that the distributors in Australia are Westan, Acheive, and esystems or you can view the list here.
Sorry the info's a bit sparse, this really isn't my area:P
*shrug* IANAFAE (I Am Not A Failure Analysis Engineer) (come to think of it - I'm not even an engineer!), all I can tell ya is what I see. I'm not sure why the data gets corrupt, but I see several a month where scandisk reports bad sectors, but if you back up the data and low level format it (read: write zeroes, I'm not going to go into an explanation of why you can't do a real low level format on an IDE drive) no errors are found and when the drive is repartitioned/formatted, scandisk is happy as a clam.
As the post above this mentions, scandisk is a filesystem check utility, not a hardware diagnostic, so it's actually quite easy to fool into thinking that there's a problem with the device when there really isn't. On the other hand, the utilities from the HD company (us, Maxtor, whoever) are decidedly NOT filesystem checkers; even more, they're totally filesystem/data independent. They check only that the hardware of the device is functioning correctly, not that the data in any given place makes sense to any given system.
*Insert standard disclaimer: I work for Western Digital tech support*
Gee what's your name? I'll be sure to put a note in your case file in the WD call tracking system that you intentionally damage your drives and should never receive an RMA again;) That point aside, an error code is NOT at all required to RMA a drive. Quite often we get people calling with drives that won't run diags at all, in which case it's ridiculous to require a code. We WILL encourage ppl to run diags if we think it may be a problem not with the drive itself. A classic scenario is someone receiving bad sector warnings from Scandisk. This definitely does not mean the drive has bad sectors, only that scandisk can't read the data at those points (most likely the result of corrupt data). Besides, you can always do an RMA through the web site, which doesn't require any type of code - there's a field for it but you can just leave it blank.
Now on to the main topic, the problem you had here was definitely heat. Only an electronics failure would cause the drive to run in PIO instead of DMA like that - if it was a physical failure with the platters or somesuch caused by vibration, the drive would run at DMA but you'd get no data. Possibly the asic that controls data transfer got a bit fried and was no longer able to signal at top speed. Instead of quitting outright, the drives are all backward compatible all the way down to PIO1 and such and are programmed to drop their transfer speeds down if they encounter a problem at the higher speeds. So logically, (if...she...weighs the same as a duck...wait wrong explanation...) this particular one was probably a heat problem.
Now, let me touch on a few more I saw floating around in this thread:
1) No, do NOT throw a HD against the wall while running, your data will be gone faster than you can hear the clunk.
2) It doesn't matter what orientation you have the drive mounted at, just so long as it's mounted SECURELY (read: 4 screws and to a metal enclosure that's grounded).
3) Vibration is BADBADBAD for a drive. While it may not cause outright failure immediately, it will cause a huge number of misreads and retries on the drive, thereby slowing down the overall performance of the drive. This is one of the things that's driving the overall industry move to fluid dynamic bearings (FDB) - they cause much less vibration and therefore contribute to the logevity of the drive. And if the vibration is getting bad, it WILL cause the heads to touch the platters momentarily. Now the drives are designed with this in mind and have an extremely thin (several atoms) layer of lubrication on the platters. But don't encourage it if you value your data.
Any other questions you want answered, drop me an email:)
Nope, all of the other email addresses I have (including the one I use on here) receive hardly any spam. Altogether I might get 2-4 pieces a day, as opposed to my Prodigy account that was up to 95+ spam per day.
What if I can't stand either MSN Exploder *OR* the Yahoo browser? And what if I'm running Linux? And what if I already use Mozilla and can't get to the website to register even on my Win98 partition because I used 98lite to rip out IE?
It's not a major invasion of privacy, just an annoying pain in the ass as they constantly harrass you to install it when you don't want to/can't/whatever.
See previous post - they just annoy the HELL out of you til you either install it or cancel the account;) I tried to do it in Mozilla also, same result, too bad, so sad, I cancelled =)
when Prodigy was bought out by SBC. They went on and on about no changes, same service, etc. Then I started getting almost weekly mails with cd's in nice bright colorful cases urging me to install my new SBC Yahoo! Dial software to enable new worlds of features! Of course I didn't because I just kept my Prodigy account around for the old email address and never dialed in, so what was the point of installing new software?
Finally they started bombarding me with emails that extolled the virtues of the new software. My guess is when you install it then it checks you off on the master list on the server that you installed it, nevermind if you never needed to or didn't care at all. Finally after trying to register on the web site and failing miserably, I just called and cancelled the account. And ya know what? My spam amount is down 95% since then;) There's something to be said for smaller ISP's...
Yeah I've been hearing rumors that Maxtor has changed their "no hassle" RMA policy quite a bit recently. Haven't had the change to experience it yet, but what I've heard agrees with what you've said...*comfort*
That being said, did you use a debit/check card? I don't remember if I mentioned before (and I'm too damn lazy to look back) but when we do an authorize on a credit card that's a debit/check card, the actual bank that issued the card usually puts a hold on the funds for several days. Basically they expect a charge to come through after the authorize and since it's working directly with a checking account balance, they reserve the funds aside in anticipation of the charge. When the charge doesn't come like they expect, they drop the hold. Just something to think about:)
As far as reman 40 gb drives, if you wanted to directly purchase re-mfg drives they would end up being somewhat more than that - I don't have direct quotes available. Basically if we charge you for a non-returned RMA drive, you get the warranty voided and no tech support and a nice note in your case that you don't return drives;) When you straight out buy a re-mfg drive, you get tech support, warranty of varying periods (you can specify this at time of purchase), etc. - basically full support for the drive.
Which just underlines the point that MTBF isn't worth a load of jack anyway;) Part of the problem is that it's IDEAL conditions, not everday people taking their computers to LAN parties and dropping coffee in them. See the discussion above about shock rating of the drives and how incredibly easy it is to exceed this. Also don't forget you're dealing now with MUCH smaller sector/head sizes than previously. I definitely wouldn't say this makes the drive less reliable, but it absolutely makes it MUCH more delicate.
If you buy cheapo "OEM" drives from some box stacker, chances are it'll be poorly packed, and/or handled badly before it reaches you. Manufacturers can't do much if the box shifters keep throwing boxes of drives about. Just because they're rated up to 300G+ doesn't mean you don't want to handle them like eggs.
You mean the places like Tiger Direct (there are many others but that one's fresh in my mind) who ship you the HD in a bubble envelope? Then they say they don't take returns even though it states it in clear print right on their website.
You can still get higher end drives with full warranties, and in some cases purchase extended warranties for another $20 or so.
AFAIK, Western Digital is the only company still allowing you to purchase the extended warranty on 1 year warranty drives (Disclaimer: I work for them). Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't know what HD company you're referring to in this, but it's obviously not the one I work for. And I just happen to work for WD, in tech support/RMA's, so I think I'm qualified to write a rebuttal;)
Drive manufacturers require you put up the (supposed) retail cost of the drive before they issue an RMA. Why do I say supposed? Because it's more than twice what I would pay for the same drive from the shop down the road. And way over their current MSRP.
When setting up an advance replacement (where we send the HD out to you first), we do require a credit card # but we do NOT charge it. We do an authorize operation, which checks that the card is valid and that it has at least enough available on it at that exact moment to cover the drive should you not return it. And we do not charge double fair market value for the drive, in fact we get a lot of comments that our authorize amounts are VERY low - about $25 for a 20 gb drive and $31 for a 40 gb (both 7200 rpm) to give you a quote off the top of my head.
Then they ship you the replacement.
You return the crapped-out drive.
Standard practice.
Then, if they determine that the drive is buggered outside the warranty, you've bought yourself a "new" (because they reserve the right to ship you a used drive as a replacement) drive at twice the cost that you paid for the damn thing. And you're paying the shipping.
We do indeed test the bad drives when we get in, however we don't wait for the testing to get done before sending out the replacement, mostly in the interest of time. And if your old drive tests out with NDF (no defect found), big deal, you won't hear about it or get charged for it. And if you've managed to damage your drive outside the warranty, I'm sorry I have no pity for you. Almost the only way it's damaged outside of warranty is if it's physically damaged, and if that's the case you're the stupid one for even thinking you'd get it replaced. On the off chance this would be the case, the drive would be rejected back to you and you would have the option of returning the replacement or purchasing it, see my note above about fair market value. Yes you would pay shipping back of the replacement drive back, as I said physical damage is one of the only ways to get it rejected back and if you're dumb enough to send it in like that, you deserve what you get.
As far as sending remanufactured drives as replacements, yup we do, as well as I believe every other IDE manufacturer (scsi I'm not as familiar with so I don't want to conjecture). And repeat replacements from failed refurb drives are actually more rare than you'd think. Sorry I don't have any numbers, just personal experience. And sorry for the long-windedness but either you're REALLY dealing with the wrong company or you're stretching the truth like Gumby on a taffy machine.
I won't even buy CDRW disks - is $.25 (for very nice media) REALLY so expensive that you can't afford to use a new one every time? Is it more expensive than your important data?
I work a lot with small business backups and an audio recording studio. All of the small businesses refuse to touch cdrw and the recording studio is the same story. The good old cd-r is by far your best bet for data integrity. Every time you rewrite a cdrw, you're physically altering the media and therefore introducing more chances for error. From the recording studio's perspective, the BLER rate (Block Error Rate - redundant, I know) is much worse for CDRW disks, so they wouldn't dare use them since the errors would be reproduced when the master is copied to the glass master for pressing. Point being, if you want data integrity, do not use cdrw's, use cd-r's instead.
I've been looking into this for a while, and I'm under the impression that Win XP does NOT fully boot in 10 seconds or whatever. It seems like it boots the UI first, so you get your desktop/whatever right away and can do basic stuff, then continues to start up services after you're surfing my computer. The reason I say this as I've seen multiple times when a Win XP system was started up and as soon as the desktop was up I launched a program. Depending on what the program does, you may get an error message that states the service isn't started yet. Waiting for a few seconds and trying it again generally results in the program running fine. Just my $.02 on that topic.
A. After it is released what is the ETA of the hack that will work around Palladium?
Would that be measured in days or hours? Do they have a contingency plan in place if the number ends up being negative and crashes their security database?;)
Slashdot Mirror
You're correct, I've read the same article. It was from the Anandtech tour of an Nvidia plant I'm 99% sure. They looked at a pre-fab lab and had a large IKOS box there that they were emulating the NV30 core on at about 1/10000 or lower speed ratio. Article is located here on Anandtech.
Basically what it boils down to is it would work great for lower performance applicatons like sound and such, but would fail miserably at any higher demand applications such as video processor.
For me it was 2001 - how a boring piece of crap ever made it out of the cutting room in the first place is beyond me. I would've been absolutely TOTALLY lost had I not read the book several times before I watched it. Now I'm not really a fan of being hit over the head with the plot, but I at least like to know what's going on without having to first know the plot already or being required to spend 10 weeks in meditation to figure it out!
I feel your pain...
;)
I did finish HS, although bored out of my skull and then some. Went to a little college, found it unbelievably boring and way too much like a "big kids' high school". And I've several times run into the you don't have a degree get out of my office attitude, although that's starting to change quite a bit from what I see. A lot of IT managers (at least the ones with more brains than the chair they sit on) are realizing that most college-trained CS-wielding code monkeys these days have absolutely no interest in computers and therefore are basically unable to pick up anything new or be able to think even remotely outside the box without a class to teach them how. Several managers I've worked with actually were beginning to not even look at degrees (one guy as far as having his secretary black marker the education section of all incoming resumes!). They're finding out that formal education is NOT the only game in town, and that many times self educated coders are far superior to formally educated ones. After all, if you learned it all yourself, obviously you were interested AND motivated enough to digest it and understand it all without a teacher/boss telling you to.
damn it's late...hope at least a little of this makes sense
I don't know about you, but I don't consider the position of "random caller on the phone" to be a position of trust. In fact just the opposite, seeing all the telemarketing and scams that have gone on in the past 50 years or so. So in reality, he wasn't in a position of trust, such as corporate IT or something similar who is explicitly given the trust and responsibility, but was incorrectly given implicit trust based on who the caller assumed he was.
I agree, it's not right, but I would place more responsibility on the other end of the phone. If you have something you want secured, do you put it in a prefab plywood shed out back and give the key to the neighborhood paperboy?
Yeah what you're describing is known as "stiction". Happens when the lubrication on the platters gets old and sometimes begins to break down. The heads will stick to the platters in the park position and prevent the motor from being able to spin. By knocking the drive, that frees the heads and the motor can turn again and raise the heads.
Trust me, the more you know about them, the more you see it's a miracle they operate in the first place ;) Sometime I'll write an overview of how the heads and servo controller know where your data is on the drive - it's pretty insane and a hell of a lot of guesswork...
Sounds like you're on the right track. The drives do have pretty tight undercurrent protection, and will do exactly what you describe when not getting enough juice. I'f you're running anything under a 300 watt with more than 1 other drive in the system (and I'd doubt you're running anything over a 250 with the system you describe) then it's rather likely that's what's going on. Although to be sure I would suggest hooking it up to another computer and running some diags on it just to be safe. As I've said before, IANAFAE (I Am Not A Failure Analysis Engineer) :)
Well I don't have TOO much info to that end, but what I was able to get from one of our people in sales that the distributors in Australia are Westan, Acheive, and esystems or you can view the list here. Sorry the info's a bit sparse, this really isn't my area :P
*shrug* IANAFAE (I Am Not A Failure Analysis Engineer) (come to think of it - I'm not even an engineer!), all I can tell ya is what I see. I'm not sure why the data gets corrupt, but I see several a month where scandisk reports bad sectors, but if you back up the data and low level format it (read: write zeroes, I'm not going to go into an explanation of why you can't do a real low level format on an IDE drive) no errors are found and when the drive is repartitioned/formatted, scandisk is happy as a clam.
As the post above this mentions, scandisk is a filesystem check utility, not a hardware diagnostic, so it's actually quite easy to fool into thinking that there's a problem with the device when there really isn't. On the other hand, the utilities from the HD company (us, Maxtor, whoever) are decidedly NOT filesystem checkers; even more, they're totally filesystem/data independent. They check only that the hardware of the device is functioning correctly, not that the data in any given place makes sense to any given system.
*Insert standard disclaimer: I work for Western Digital tech support*
;) That point aside, an error code is NOT at all required to RMA a drive. Quite often we get people calling with drives that won't run diags at all, in which case it's ridiculous to require a code. We WILL encourage ppl to run diags if we think it may be a problem not with the drive itself. A classic scenario is someone receiving bad sector warnings from Scandisk. This definitely does not mean the drive has bad sectors, only that scandisk can't read the data at those points (most likely the result of corrupt data). Besides, you can always do an RMA through the web site, which doesn't require any type of code - there's a field for it but you can just leave it blank.
:)
Gee what's your name? I'll be sure to put a note in your case file in the WD call tracking system that you intentionally damage your drives and should never receive an RMA again
Now on to the main topic, the problem you had here was definitely heat. Only an electronics failure would cause the drive to run in PIO instead of DMA like that - if it was a physical failure with the platters or somesuch caused by vibration, the drive would run at DMA but you'd get no data. Possibly the asic that controls data transfer got a bit fried and was no longer able to signal at top speed. Instead of quitting outright, the drives are all backward compatible all the way down to PIO1 and such and are programmed to drop their transfer speeds down if they encounter a problem at the higher speeds. So logically, (if...she...weighs the same as a duck...wait wrong explanation...) this particular one was probably a heat problem.
Now, let me touch on a few more I saw floating around in this thread:
1) No, do NOT throw a HD against the wall while running, your data will be gone faster than you can hear the clunk.
2) It doesn't matter what orientation you have the drive mounted at, just so long as it's mounted SECURELY (read: 4 screws and to a metal enclosure that's grounded).
3) Vibration is BADBADBAD for a drive. While it may not cause outright failure immediately, it will cause a huge number of misreads and retries on the drive, thereby slowing down the overall performance of the drive. This is one of the things that's driving the overall industry move to fluid dynamic bearings (FDB) - they cause much less vibration and therefore contribute to the logevity of the drive. And if the vibration is getting bad, it WILL cause the heads to touch the platters momentarily. Now the drives are designed with this in mind and have an extremely thin (several atoms) layer of lubrication on the platters. But don't encourage it if you value your data.
Any other questions you want answered, drop me an email
"'Scuse me, but...uhh...may we have your liver?"
Had to be said...
Nope, all of the other email addresses I have (including the one I use on here) receive hardly any spam. Altogether I might get 2-4 pieces a day, as opposed to my Prodigy account that was up to 95+ spam per day.
What if I can't stand either MSN Exploder *OR* the Yahoo browser? And what if I'm running Linux? And what if I already use Mozilla and can't get to the website to register even on my Win98 partition because I used 98lite to rip out IE?
It's not a major invasion of privacy, just an annoying pain in the ass as they constantly harrass you to install it when you don't want to/can't/whatever.
See previous post - they just annoy the HELL out of you til you either install it or cancel the account ;) I tried to do it in Mozilla also, same result, too bad, so sad, I cancelled =)
when Prodigy was bought out by SBC. They went on and on about no changes, same service, etc. Then I started getting almost weekly mails with cd's in nice bright colorful cases urging me to install my new SBC Yahoo! Dial software to enable new worlds of features! Of course I didn't because I just kept my Prodigy account around for the old email address and never dialed in, so what was the point of installing new software?
;) There's something to be said for smaller ISP's...
Finally they started bombarding me with emails that extolled the virtues of the new software. My guess is when you install it then it checks you off on the master list on the server that you installed it, nevermind if you never needed to or didn't care at all. Finally after trying to register on the web site and failing miserably, I just called and cancelled the account. And ya know what? My spam amount is down 95% since then
Let me guess: I must pluck the pebble from the palm of your hand? Or, more appropriately, click the link from top of your page?
(ok weak attempt at humor, I'm tired, been a long day, blah blah blah)
*clicks*
Woo does that mean you're my friend now? =)
Yeah I've been hearing rumors that Maxtor has changed their "no hassle" RMA policy quite a bit recently. Haven't had the change to experience it yet, but what I've heard agrees with what you've said...*comfort*
:)
;) When you straight out buy a re-mfg drive, you get tech support, warranty of varying periods (you can specify this at time of purchase), etc. - basically full support for the drive.
That being said, did you use a debit/check card? I don't remember if I mentioned before (and I'm too damn lazy to look back) but when we do an authorize on a credit card that's a debit/check card, the actual bank that issued the card usually puts a hold on the funds for several days. Basically they expect a charge to come through after the authorize and since it's working directly with a checking account balance, they reserve the funds aside in anticipation of the charge. When the charge doesn't come like they expect, they drop the hold. Just something to think about
As far as reman 40 gb drives, if you wanted to directly purchase re-mfg drives they would end up being somewhat more than that - I don't have direct quotes available. Basically if we charge you for a non-returned RMA drive, you get the warranty voided and no tech support and a nice note in your case that you don't return drives
Which just underlines the point that MTBF isn't worth a load of jack anyway ;) Part of the problem is that it's IDEAL conditions, not everday people taking their computers to LAN parties and dropping coffee in them. See the discussion above about shock rating of the drives and how incredibly easy it is to exceed this. Also don't forget you're dealing now with MUCH smaller sector/head sizes than previously. I definitely wouldn't say this makes the drive less reliable, but it absolutely makes it MUCH more delicate.
As far as sending remanufactured drives as replacements, yup we do, as well as I believe every other IDE manufacturer (scsi I'm not as familiar with so I don't want to conjecture). And repeat replacements from failed refurb drives are actually more rare than you'd think. Sorry I don't have any numbers, just personal experience. And sorry for the long-windedness but either you're REALLY dealing with the wrong company or you're stretching the truth like Gumby on a taffy machine.
I won't even buy CDRW disks - is $.25 (for very nice media) REALLY so expensive that you can't afford to use a new one every time? Is it more expensive than your important data?
I work a lot with small business backups and an audio recording studio. All of the small businesses refuse to touch cdrw and the recording studio is the same story. The good old cd-r is by far your best bet for data integrity. Every time you rewrite a cdrw, you're physically altering the media and therefore introducing more chances for error. From the recording studio's perspective, the BLER rate (Block Error Rate - redundant, I know) is much worse for CDRW disks, so they wouldn't dare use them since the errors would be reproduced when the master is copied to the glass master for pressing. Point being, if you want data integrity, do not use cdrw's, use cd-r's instead.
I've been looking into this for a while, and I'm under the impression that Win XP does NOT fully boot in 10 seconds or whatever. It seems like it boots the UI first, so you get your desktop/whatever right away and can do basic stuff, then continues to start up services after you're surfing my computer. The reason I say this as I've seen multiple times when a Win XP system was started up and as soon as the desktop was up I launched a program. Depending on what the program does, you may get an error message that states the service isn't started yet. Waiting for a few seconds and trying it again generally results in the program running fine. Just my $.02 on that topic.
Would that be measured in days or hours? Do they have a contingency plan in place if the number ends up being negative and crashes their security database?
C:\Windows. C:\Windows run. C:\Windows crash.
(btw, DOS uses backslashes