New found hatred for Western Digital....

[stj]

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

i'll tell you something funny,

flash is rated in the datasheets as 10year minimum retention.
dream-on in most cases.

eproms were also rated at 10years minimum.
i work with eproms all day - i regularly get stuff nearly 30years old that are 100% fine.
25years is common before bit's fail.

the only differences between eprom & flash are that flash has electrical erase - probably a gated drain-wire in each quantum-well.
and flash (usually) has a higher density.

i think the future is probably going to be ferro-electric ram.
i'v done experiments with ferro-ram replacing battery-backed sram and the stuff is seriously fast and 100% reliable.
datasheet claims 40years+ retention without power.
if it manages 10 it will be better than flash!

[Agent24]

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

Yeah I saw that 10-Year retention on an 8GB USB drive I recently bought, I thought "Yeah, right!"

What about EEPROM as used for Firmware\BIOS?

Are you saying that leaving a motherboard for long enough without give the EEPROM a 'refresh' would result in the BIOS becoming corrupted due to lost data?

[stj]

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

bios arent eeprom, they are flash.
eeprom are very poor performance and small.

but yes, leave a bios for several years and it may not run.
and the data isnt refreshed when you power or read the chip - only when you write to it afaik.
it is refreshed with ferro-ram i think.

[Junk Parts]

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

Tiger direct has 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm SATA drives on sale for $39.00 if anyone is interested.

[bgavin]

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

I'm burning in another set of WD Caviar Green 2TB -EARS drives for a client. The failure rate on all the big drives is so high, I want to make sure a full surface scan with WDC data lifeguard passes 100% before installing in the client's server.

Two 640gb Caviar Black and two 2TB Green, each in a RAID1 group, should produce a reliable file system. I have a few others running this configuration.

This is the first time with the Supermicro board. So far, I'm impressed with Supermicro for server boards. It is an XBN7 something or other, 3200 chipset, DDR2-800 at 1.8v fixed (yay!). It ran 36 hours of Memtest with G.Skill 4-4-4-12 2x2gb sticks. Very pleased.

I'll set up the Intel RAID tonight after the last drive clears diagnostics.

[Agent24]

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

Tiger direct has 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm SATA drives on sale for $39.00 if anyone is interested.

Are those the ST31000528AS drives? I've got 2 of those and they're great.

I'm burning in another set of WD Caviar Green 2TB -EARS drives for a client. The failure rate on all the big drives is so high, I want to make sure a full surface scan with WDC data lifeguard passes 100% before installing in the client's server.

Any ideas why the 1.5TB and 2TB do have high failure rates? I bought the 1TB drives myself because I saw the Newegg reviews on the bigger ones showed up a lot of failures.

[Scenic]

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

Interesting... now I really think I will stick to hard drives!!

Bring on the 3TB and 4TB drives and may the 2TB ones drop their prices

which brings me back to the idea of this post..

[Agent24]

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

which brings me back to the idea of this post..

But is there any point though?
If they can get 4TB in 3.5" why bother making a bigger and slower drive?

Since the Bigfoot is a rather old drive design, updating or building a new design will cost more time and money in R&D, which may not be recoverable if the drive is big and slow and a lot of people don't buy it.

They may buy it if it was quite cheap, but then even with more sales the profits may still be just as low because of the lower selling price.

Remember the primary objective of a business is to make a profit...

[stj]

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

everybody has 5 1/4 bays,
if you can get 4gig in a 3.5 then you can get probably 8+ in 5 1/4
and the rotation may be slower but if the data is on the outer edge it will stream faster than a 7200
and you have a bigger frame to disipate heat.

big drives would be perfect for backup drives.
i'd take 2

[PCBONEZ]

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

I'm burning in another set of WD Caviar Green 2TB -EARS drives for a client. The failure rate on all the big drives is so high, I want to make sure a full surface scan with WDC data lifeguard passes 100% before installing in the client's server.

Two 640gb Caviar Black and two 2TB Green, each in a RAID1 group, should produce a reliable file system. I have a few others running this configuration.

This is the first time with the Supermicro board. So far, I'm impressed with Supermicro for server boards. It is an XBN7 something or other, 3200 chipset, DDR2-800 at 1.8v fixed (yay!). It ran 36 hours of Memtest with G.Skill 4-4-4-12 2x2gb sticks. Very pleased.

I'll set up the Intel RAID tonight after the last drive clears diagnostics.

I'm a fan of Supermicro boards.
Off the top of my head I have some X7DAL-E, X7DBE, and C2SBA+II in service.

I still don't use drives over 500Gb.
No faith in bigger drives being reliable.

.

[PCBONEZ]

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

Are those the ST31000528AS drives? I've got 2 of those and they're great.


Any ideas why the 1.5TB and 2TB do have high failure rates? I bought the 1TB drives myself because I saw the Newegg reviews on the bigger ones showed up a lot of failures.

Going totally layman terms here....
High capacity drives have less physical space for each bit. [Less surface area.] As a result there is less 'mass' [area] to hold the charge representing a 1 or a 0 and the charges are weaker. - Since the spacing between the bits is also less, the charges are more likely to 'bleed' to each other across the disc. - And, as the bit-areas are smaller targets the mechanicals have less room for error to 'hit the spot' accurately.

.

[Agent24]

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

everybody has 5 1/4 bays,
if you can get 4gig in a 3.5 then you can get probably 8+ in 5 1/4
and the rotation may be slower but if the data is on the outer edge it will stream faster than a 7200
and you have a bigger frame to disipate heat.

big drives would be perfect for backup drives.
i'd take 2

Yeah, well mine are all full of DVD writers etc so wouldn't be much use to me actually.

Still, it does seem like a clever idea to increase capacity, maybe after the 4TB drives they will have to do it.

I just don't think they will until they know they can make a profit from it.

Going totally layman terms here....
High capacity drives have less physical space for each bit. [Less surface area.] As a result there is less 'mass' [area] to hold the charge representing a 1 or a 0 and the charges are weaker. - Since the spacing between the bits is also less, the charges are more likely to 'bleed' to each other across the disc. - And, as the bit-areas are smaller targets the mechanicals have less room for error to 'hit the spot' accurately.

.

I understand that but I think the problems (on Newegg reviews) were more of the drives completely failing than just random data loss.

[PCBONEZ]

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

I understand that but I think the problems (on Newegg reviews) were more of the drives completely failing than just random data loss.

Mechanicals and target size as with my last sentence.

[stj]

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

buying 500gig drives wont help,
if you look at the mfr datasheets you will see the 500gig drives are the same as the terabyte ones - just less platters fitted.

[acstech]

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

I'll admit that I haven't read the whole thread, and I apologize if this has come up before, but I wonder how much Universal Package Smashers (UPS) has to do with this? They even say your package is subject to a 6 foot drop.

[seanc]

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

I've probably mentioned my batch of 25 500GB Seagate drives before... one just failed with supposed thousands of bad sectors. Data seems irrecoverable, MHDD is powerless to it's issues. I can see folder structure, anything else = I/O error.

[Agent24]

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

I'll admit that I haven't read the whole thread, and I apologize if this has come up before, but I wonder how much Universal Package Smashers (UPS) has to do with this? They even say your package is subject to a 6 foot drop.

Good point. I now always pick my hard drives up from shops myself and take utmost care in transporting them home.

I haven't had any problems with any of those drives yet. Interestingly enough a 250GB Western Digital which I did have couriered to me has recently reallocated a few sectors...

[dood]

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

Good point. I now always pick my hard drives up from shops myself and take utmost care in transporting them home.

I haven't had any problems with any of those drives yet. Interestingly enough a 250GB Western Digital which I did have couriered to me has recently reallocated a few sectors...

Uh... and how did those drives get from Thailand to your local computer shop?

[stj]

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

on a forklift,
i can assure the that the bulk-box wasnt dropped off a covayor at the airport or courior sorting center.

big boxes are "handled", it's the smaller ones that are thrown down chutes and off conveyers.

[dood]

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

on a forklift,
i can assure the that the bulk-box wasnt dropped off a covayor at the airport or courior sorting center.

big boxes are "handled", it's the smaller ones that are thrown down chutes and off conveyers.

*chuckle*