New found hatred for Western Digital....

[Agent24]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Solid state storage is the future in reliability the HDD is the only magnetic media device still in a modern PC. When the prices of solid state memory come down and the storage size on a single IC increases further they will dwarf magnetic HDDs.

I believe manufacturers are reaching the limits of what they can fit on the platters in a 3.5 footprint. The new perpendicular recording technique used when HDD manufacturers hit the terabyte mark is evidence of this.

When you think about it platters spinning at 7k RPM (fluid dynamic bearings to run the platters with minimal runout and quietly for thousands of hours) the tolerance of the read head gliding over the platter is thinner than a human hair. It's a wonder these things work at all. We need something simpler.

I'm still not convinced by SSDs yet. With hard drives we often get some kind of warning before the drive dies. Strange noises is a good start. With silicon, the only time you hear a warning noise is when the device is letting out the magic smoke, and by then it's too late.

So, I'm just waiting to see what the failures are like before I jump on the SSD bandwagon. SSDs are far, far too expensive for me now anyway.

The price of OCZ's Colossus 1TB SSD is $3200 US from Newegg.

I bought my 1TB Seagates for $120 NZ each which is about $86 US, Not to mention 2TB drives are already out, costing far less than $3200 and WD and Hitachi think 3GB is achievable this year already.

Hitachi at also predicts a 4TB HDD by 2011, which I'm sure will come nowhere near the $3200 price tag of the SSD a quarter of it's size.

Even if a 4TB SSD comes out any time soon, the price will be insane.

I do believe that SSDs of some kind will most likely become the future of storage but not just yet. The good old hard drive wins on price by miles.

[93daytona]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

If in a mirror, you'd have to rebuild the array every time it hiccuped. I too learned the hard way about this some time back. I only buy enterprise grade stuff for my personal use now.

Were the 1TB blacks giving you issues? Did you ditch them? My pair have been running flawlessly in a RAID 1 though my MB's onboard controller.

[Colt45ws]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

I'm still not convinced by SSDs yet. With hard drives we often get some kind of warning before the drive dies. Strange noises is a good start. With silicon, the only time you hear a warning noise is when the device is letting out the magic smoke, and by then it's too late.

So, I'm just waiting to see what the failures are like before I jump on the SSD bandwagon. SSDs are far, far too expensive for me now anyway.

The price of OCZ's Colossus 1TB SSD is $3200 US from Newegg.

I bought my 1TB Seagates for $120 NZ each which is about $86 US, Not to mention 2TB drives are already out, costing far less than $3200 and WD and Hitachi think 3GB is achievable this year already.

Hitachi at also predicts a 4TB HDD by 2011, which I'm sure will come nowhere near the $3200 price tag of the SSD a quarter of it's size.

Even if a 4TB SSD comes out any time soon, the price will be insane.

I do believe that SSDs of some kind will most likely become the future of storage but not just yet. The good old hard drive wins on price by miles.

I agree they are far too expensive for storage drives atm. I still bought a 64GB SSD for a system drive. Mainly because its a pain to get Windows set up on the RocketRaid card. Dont need a whole lot of space for that job. I think Im only using half of it..

[Topcat]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Were the 1TB blacks giving you issues? Did you ditch them? My pair have been running flawlessly in a RAID 1 though my MB's onboard controller.

No, mine are running super. The problem I had was with a pair of 500gb or 750gb (dodn't remember which ones they were) blacks some time ago. This was before the TLER hack (or atleast before I knew of it), and I just ditched those drives (put them in systems as single drives and sold them). My 1TB blacks have been perfect, running in a RAID1 on a 3ware sata2 controller since I built this system back in February.

[4tified]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Both the GX620 and the iMac are both sata1 interfaces...

The GX620 has a SATA II controller.

On a side note, I have never had a problem with a WD drive up until the other day. I have an Optiplex 780 at work that I installed Windows 7 on, but within 3 hrs., the hard drive failed to be recognized by the controller. It was a WD Scorpio Black (2.5").

[Topcat]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

The GX620 has a SATA II controller.

On a side note, I have never had a problem with a WD drive up until the other day. I have an Optiplex 780 at work that I installed Windows 7 on, but within 3 hrs., the hard drive failed to be recognized by the controller. It was a WD Scorpio Black (2.5").

You are correct. The SX280 is sata1. All the more reason to smash these drives with a hammer, the GX620 should have loved them.

[4tified]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

You are correct. The SX280 is sata1. All the more reason to smash these drives with a hammer, the GX620 should have loved them.

Haha. It''s weird that you're having these issues, I wonder if it's firmware related? We use the Caviar Blue's in alot of our GX620 USFF's here at work an they seem to run fine.

[Topcat]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Haha. It''s weird that you're having these issues, I wonder if it's firmware related? We use the Caviar Blue's in alot of our GX620 USFF's here at work an they seem to run fine.

I thought of that. When the issue arose, I noted th BIOS revision on the 620, which was A04. A11 is the latest, I updated it and it still didn't work. The drives were manufactured in dec '09. I didn't look for firmware updates for the drives, as new as they are, theres no reason in the world there should be these kinds of compatibility issues. I've never in my almost 20 years of PC experience had to update firmware on a hard drive to make it work.

[AudioCraZ]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

the only time I have ran raid, is with a LSI or Adaptec controller. They may be more expensive, but damn, are they reliable.

The only other problem I have seen is people stacking 4 drives in a cheap ATX case, and basically the drives cook themselves to death. Even with fans, the front of the drives plug up with crap, and the heat just builds. Worked on too many computers where people would have fly by nights build them a "server" and it was nothing more but 4 cheap drives on a gaming board, and they are wondering why the system was failing after 2 years.... Well, there was a reason the Mobo only came with a 1 year warrenty!

[mattch]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

the only time I have ran raid, is with a LSI or Adaptec controller. They may be more expensive, but damn, are they reliable.

The only other problem I have seen is people stacking 4 drives in a cheap ATX case, and basically the drives cook themselves to death. Even with fans, the front of the drives plug up with crap, and the heat just builds. Worked on too many computers where people would have fly by nights build them a "server" and it was nothing more but 4 cheap drives on a gaming board, and they are wondering why the system was failing after 2 years.... Well, there was a reason the Mobo only came with a 1 year warrenty!

LOL

[bgavin]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Solid state storage is the future in reliability

Not yet.

SSD drives die a sudden and quick death.

They are constructed on NAND technology, and have a limited life time for write cycles. We are instructed not to defrag, chkdsk, or otherwise increase the number of writes over normal system use.

The upside is they are perfect for all the morons that carry their laptops to meetings with the lid open, and the system not in Standby (disk off|).

Mine does not bench out particularly fast under HDTACH. YMMV.

[stj]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

i had an Email from WD about the new black drives,

they are auto-sense sata2/3 3/6gig and can be forced to sata1 using a jumper.

so that's interesting - i'm getting one!

[ratdude747]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

no raid!

[Agent24]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

But check the first post?

Bought 2x 160gb WD1600AAJS hard drives, these are the WD "BLUE" series. One for a GX620USFF and the other for a customer's iMac G5 that had a bad hdd.

Neither of those systems will detect these pieces of shit. I plug them into a sata2 controller (3ware), they detect fine. Both the GX620 and the iMac are both sata1 interfaces, but the drives claim backward compatibility.....but still don't detect. Pretty pitiful. Yes, I tried the jumper trick to lock in the speed at 1.5, no avail. I connected a 500gb WD Black to each machine mentioned above, drive shows up and no problems.

Doesn't anyone make a good hard drive anymore?!?

[Junk Parts]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

JP has a question here. Why wouldn't a SSD be much quicker than a Electro mechanical hard drive? In my simple mind the SSD should be lightning fast. The old drive has to spin platters, and move heads to do anything. The SSD does this with electronics only. Shouldn't this mean that a SSD should do its thing at around 186,000 miles a second so to speak?

[stj]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

flash memory is a pain,

it reads as fast as ram,
but it writes pretty slowly.
also, most flash is 100,000 writes before the cell fails.

i wouldnt want that holding my swap partition!

[Agent24]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Seek time is 0ms as opposed to HDD with 7ms for example

[stj]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

seek 3.7ms on my fujitsu 15,000 rpm scsi drives

[bgavin]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Why wouldn't a SSD be much quicker than a Electro mechanical hard drive?

HDTach shows a burst rate of 223 MB/s on this HP 6930p laptop at work with Intel SSD drive.
Sequential averge read is 28.6 MB/sec
My Caviar Black beat this pretty soundly.

What this drive is great for, is those clods who walk from meeting to meeting with their laptop lids open (disk is still spinning).

[Wizard]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

is it G1 or G2 intel SSD? probably G1.

Cheers, Wizard