Mass storage devices.

Discussion in 'Discussions' started by OmniaNigrum, Jun 3, 2012.

  1. LionsDen

    LionsDen Member

    I think that the newer hard drives (1TB and more) are the more unreliable ones because they use the most bleeding edge technology. I stay away from the bleeding edge if I don't want to bleed any. Plus I haven't had any money to upgrade any of my drives. Currently my largest hard drive is 500GB and I had 4 of them. One has failed, but since that only had my OS on it it wasn't a big deal. I still have hard drives from over a decade ago that if I had equipment that would read them would still be usable. Actually, I do have some USB equipment that could read them, it's just the storage is so low (20GB and even drives in the MB range) that it just isn't worth my time to play with them anymore.

    The newer drives since they are bleeding edge do tend to have higher fail rates. Hard drive manufacturers are reaching their limits and are having to resort to more and more "tricks" in order to stuff more information on the drive. Unfortunately, these "tricks" can easily fail hence the higher fail rates. I would suggest that you wait for the tech to have been out for a number of years and when you get the hard drive, to purchase a completely new drive that has a lower count on it. Most likely if I were to buy one today, I would go for between 1 and 2 Tera Bytes. Those have been around long enough that the tech in them is probably a little more reliable.

    Just my $0.02 American. But I have only had 3 hard drives ever fail on me. Some of my older ones may not work but without my even touching them, they didn't fail while they were in use. This is also over the course of more than 30 years of computing. I started back before there were even such things as hard drives. :)

    EDIT: Oh yeah, in case you were wondering, I must have owned somewhere above 25 hard drives in that amount of time.
     
  2. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    I for one never use any sort of automatic backup software. I would rather not even have it as an option. I do all my backups manually.

    The BIOS of the modern hard drives is written in the firmware. And since there is zero competition, the quality is beta stage at best. The do not even bother with version numbers for it. If you want the newest BIOS for your drive, you have to manually flash it yourself. There is simply no other way to be sure it is the right version. You cannot query the BIOS for it's checksum or the date of the firmware. If you could, you could also query it for the password data, so they lock it and make it worthless.

    I have had the nightmare of locked drives that were never manually locked. They just decided suddenly that they were locked, meaning I needed to use the failsafe password method to reformat the drive or just give up on ever having it work again. It really filled me with confidence over the drive in question too. :)

    Newer drives use the same old spinning glass platters coated with ferrous metal alloys for the data surface. They use the same old read/write heads set on the side now for improved data density. They use a primitive controller and have virtually nothing actually new about them besides improved data density and higher price. That they fail more often is a sign of the fact that there is no competition.

    I found another manufacturer. But I am loath to give money to IBM for anything. And I cannot find where the drives are actually made. For all I know, they are WD/Seagate/Hitachi drives rebranded. And they cost about twice or even thrice as much.

    Hard drive makers are *STILL* pretending that there is exactly one and no more facilities in the world that makes hard drives. They are still giving the "flooding damaged our equipment so we doubled the prices" BS. But I saw through that from the beginning. The water never even touched the interior floor of most parts of the facility. And there are dozens of other facilities that can do everything they did there.

    The time is perfect for another company to come in and setup a facility and make their own hard drives and steal every cent from the cheating bastards with the monopoly. But they would have to resist the urge to have stocks or WD would buy them out too. That is the closest to competition they come. They buy anyone making hard drives, or sue them into submission.
     
  3. LionsDen

    LionsDen Member

    They may use the same substrates and such but the read and write heads are changing all the time. A new technology comes along that allows them to write more information in the same amount of space. Personally, I wait a while until the bugs have been worked out before getting the latest and greatest. There is a reason it is called the bleeding edge, usually you end up getting cut every once in a while. I'm constantly looking at tech websites and such so I do hear about these new technologies, I just don't go too far in depth on them. I like to know that there is something new and that if I wait a few years, likely the bugs are out and it's fine for my use. :)
     
  4. deek

    deek Controller of Bits Staff Member

    So as a man who lives, breathes, and formats hard drives I would point you to this interesting article about an online storage company, POD 2.0.

    So while you aren't building a POD yourself they do highlight a hardrive manufacture, Hitachi. I've looked around and indeed their 3TB drives do seem to give a good quality vs. cost use case. If you are really concerned about redundant storage I would look into getting a Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution that lets you put in your own drives. QNAP, Drobo, & Netgear all have some decent options that take the burden of setting things up yourself.​
    On a side note, simply avoid WD Blu & Greens all together if you plan on going with a solution without good fault tolerance. They are simply not worth the time, money, & hassle.​
     
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  5. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    I was thinking of avoiding the greens and blues too, and I think you are probably right. The Blacks are reliable much more than the rest and only cost about twice as much. The cheapest Newegg has is this:
    Western Digital Caviar Black WD2002FAEX 2TB $218 with shipping. 10.9 cents per GB.

    That is not bad I suppose since the fail rate on the Black line is less than 25% as they are second to the best drives they make. The best are the enterprise class RAID capable drives like this one:
    Western Digital RE4 WD2003FYYS 2 TB $302 with shipping. 15.1 cents per GB.

    Each of these examples is a 7200 RPM drive with a 64MB cache. The later has TLER by default. (TLER = Time Limited Error Recovery. That is required for reliable RAID use as most RAIDs will fail a drive and have to rebuild the array if they have to wait more than a set amount of time. Usually just a few seconds.)

    I see no reason to use Hitachi as they are also fully owned and operated by Western Digital. I cannot see a reason to think their drives will actually compete. I rather suspect they would be forced to intentionally have inferior drives to give their new masters better press.

    Here is a reference.
    http://www.wdc.com/en/company/pressroom/releases/?release=ba433e4b-bff8-4d99-b60f-7f02aa42f444
     
  6. deek

    deek Controller of Bits Staff Member

    Just because they are owned by WD doesn't mean they are making the same product. When a company is purchased like that and keep the product branded the same it is usually targeting a different market segment. Hard drive manufacturers LOVE working with OEMs because they place HUGE orders. The newegg/retail market for hard drives is much smaller than the OEM market and product quality is actually reflected in that.

    That said I'd go with whatever makes you feel best and puts your mind as ease as well as not breaking your pocketbook.
     
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  7. Aegho

    Aegho Member

    Also (dated but meh) I remember Hitachi as having a bad rep for reliability, while WD had a good one, along with Seagate and Samsung. I haven't kept up with the times, that was 4 years ago, and in computers a LOT can happen in 4 years. I seem to remember IBM didn't have that solid a reputation for reliability either.
     
  8. Loswaith

    Loswaith Member

    Actually the hard drive division of Samsung got bought out by Seagate in december.
    I also know WD made a bid for Seagate, though they declined it, so not sure if another buyout has happened since then.

    Leaving realy only Toshiba. I've no idea the quality of their hard drives however.

    This is about the closest list I can find to the current manufactuers, though whether they are subsidary companies of bigger ones I cant be certain.
     
  9. Aegho

    Aegho Member

    Again, 4 year old reputation info. But they had a bad one, just not as bad as Hitachi.

    Rough ranking was: WD > Seagate > Samsung > IBM > Toshiba > Hitachi. With both WD and Seagate being basically neck-and-neck, samsung not really having much reputation either way despite being a bestseller, IBM having a slightly iffy one, Toshiba kinda, and Hitachi really bad.

    Btw WD owns Hitachi, but Hitachi owns IBM's harddrive division.

    The only failed HDD I've ever had was in a computer I got from my mom when she upgraded, and I used separately as a server for a bit, it was already failed when I recieved it(so it wasn't my HDD when it failed), and was a Maxtor (defunct).
     
  10. Czibor13

    Czibor13 Member

    I guess it depends on how important the data is for you, but I personally have been archiving all my movie backups on my HDD and burning a disc copy of them. I figure the odds of a DVD and the HDD not working at once is low. Plus, if one DVD goes out, the rest of my DVDs should be fine. Redoing one DVD isn't a huge deal.

    Only fault I see is trying to store all the DVDs, but most DVD-R are $30 for 100 discs (roughly $.064 per GB). DVD burners are much cheaper than blu-ray burners too. Plus DVDs are accesible on all but any computer.

    Too bad you didn't decide to purchase the HDDs before the flood. You pretty much could have had both drives for the price of a drive currently.
     
  11. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    That flood was a way to make prices rise. The work room floor remained untouched by the water they are pretending destroyed everything. They may as well blame global warming and double the price again. It would make as much sense. Do you know what happens to a hard drive that has been submerged for a few days? It gets full of water. Once drained and dried fully it would work just fine. I doubt it would even mess with the data on it since water does not negate magnetic fields.

    I had some sort of insect eat half my DVDs several years ago. I killed them all, but they literally bored through the discs. Most of the data is fine, but one little spot or two is all that is required to make a DVD die badly. They are tiny little holes. Probably about the size of a toothpick around. But most of my discs have several of them each. So the only copy I can rely upon is the archived image on my hard drives. I keep the originals still since they are the proof I actually own the media I have archived. But I keep them in different material containers now. Several layers actually. I have no idea what the insects were, but they looked like tiny June bugs.

    I have a DVD burner, but good media is still much more expensive than a hard drive. And if the hard drive works, you have zero coasters to worry about.

    I think your math is a bit off on the expense of DVDs.

    Memorex DVD+R Dual Layer 50 Pack $50 with shipping. That is a dollar per 8.5GB disc. 11.7 cents per GB.
    Single layer discs are about half the cost. There is no point in using single layers for most things I do. If they were a quarter to a third the price it would be different, but half the cost for half the capacity is not worth the trouble of compressing everything to fit on multiple Single Layer discs when I can just use a Dual Layer disc and be done with it.

    I know there *Are* cheaper discs, but Memorex works reliably and I have not made a coaster in the last several hundred burns of them. The same is not true for other brands I have tried.
     
  12. mining

    mining Member

    Eh. Floods doesn't just mean the workroom, it means the entire community. Not everything is a conspiracy, and sometimes you need to accept that prices do go up and down - for example everything that goes out of australia (lol, anything?) is gonna go up in price because of the carbon tax - similarly everything in floodland's gonna be messed up for a while, so expect things to cost more.
     
  13. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Good point. But that was October 17th of 2011. Surely they are not going to pretend that flooding in one area stopped all the other facilities that make hard drives in the world? The articles about the flooding specified that about 60% of the hard drives WD produces in the world come from Thailand, verses about 40% for other companies. Fine. But the articles carefully avoid specifying that the facilities that they make the drives in are in the areas that had flooding, and they make no mention of how much equipment was damaged. It sounds like pure BS to me.

    If anyone knows of something I am missing that would demonstrate this is not a ploy to raise prices then I am all ears. Either way I doubt my complaints will change anything. Hard drives are still the cheapest currently available mass media storage devices available by far. :(
     
  14. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    It's called Supply and Demand -- basic microeconomics. When supplies drop and demand stays the same, prices go up, because that's what the marketplace will pay. It's, essentially, basic self-interest. There's really nothing sinister about that.
     
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  15. mining

    mining Member

    Omni: Its not about the factory necessarily, its about the entire region. How many people dead, how many injured, how many without transport, homes, etc. They are going to lack employees for a while ;).
     
  16. deek

    deek Controller of Bits Staff Member

    Lets get this thread back on topic guys :)