Downtime 10/27/08-10/28/08

[Shrink908]

Here's a fun note for ya... I took the two Seagate 1TB drives and put them in a hardware RAID mirror just for the hell of it.. booted up the system and told it to partition/format them... About 10% into the format the RAID controller kicked the bad drive out saying it had too many problems and was beyond hope and continued to format the other.

[Triaxx]

Awesome, so should it just have to format a the new drive and then mirror the data?

JayJay: That's an awesome thought, but the last I knew they were very expensive and 64GB is the biggest they come.

[SickAndWrong]

Solid state is the future of data storage, no doubt. Spinning disks will go the way of magnetic tapes fairly shortly...

1TB drives are still fairly new, and if they're a new type of disk (I don't actually know anything about that but will probably be looking that up, because I like to learn - It would have never occurred to me that these disks would be very much different from the 500s and 750s and what-not) then we're still in that annoying shake-down period.

WD and Seagate have been around a long time, and you don't get that kind of staying power by making crap. So, whatever tech problems they're having now (likely they're all rushing out the biggest drives they can to fill the demand, ready or not) will likely be resolved in fairly short order. It could be that the lots TD has are older production, and the warranty replacements may come out of newer stock, or are refurbs (with the already-ID's problems fixed).

It would be suicide for these companies' reputations to continue shipping out turds in boxes. Especially if the 20% failure rate among TB drives is even close to accurate.

_____________________

If we continue to have problems when the new SG comes in, then we can work something else out, hardware-wise.

[Shrink908]

Solid state is the future of data storage, no doubt. Spinning disks will go the way of magnetic tapes fairly shortly...

1TB drives are still fairly new, and if they're a new type of disk (I don't actually know anything about that but will probably be looking that up, because I like to learn - It would have never occurred to me that these disks would be very much different from the 500s and 750s and what-not) then we're still in that annoying shake-down period.

WD and Seagate have been around a long time, and you don't get that kind of staying power by making crap. So, whatever tech problems they're having now (likely they're all rushing out the biggest drives they can to fill the demand, ready or not) will likely be resolved in fairly short order. It could be that the lots TD has are older production, and the warranty replacements may come out of newer stock, or are refurbs (with the already-ID's problems fixed).

It would be suicide for these companies' reputations to continue shipping out turds in boxes. Especially if the 20% failure rate among TB drives is even close to accurate.

_____________________

If we continue to have problems when the new SG comes in, then we can work something else out, hardware-wise.

The difference is the way it's writing.. Older drives write horizontally to the platter... Newer ones write perpendicular to it. Hence tighter data density.. I think you may be right about TD having older stock...

[SickAndWrong]

Well, after some research I found out that perpendicular recording is not a new concept. It has been around since 1949 and drum storage devices. Up to present, it has been attempted numerous times, invariably with the same result. The concept was abandoned each time due to an unacceptably high failure rate.

I admit that before doing some reading I didn't understand what perpendicular recording meant. In case I'm not the only one, a brief explanation:

Spoiler:

In longitudinal (horizontal) recording, imagine that the disk surface is a sheet of paper. In order to make a dot on the paper you have to drag your pencil across its surface a little (like normal writing with a pencil). In order for the head to "write" to the disk, it has to "drag" its magnetic field across the disk surface, and that takes up room. The head has two magnetic poles, separated by a small distance, to generate that field.

Instead, now imagine you have a thin piece of cardboard instead of paper, and a straight pin instead of a pencil. Now, to make a dot you can just press the pin into the cardboard. That takes less room. That's done by giving the disk an underlayer that is used as the second dipole for the writing head. The head itself now only has one (pointy) magnetic pole. The other pole is that layer under the oxide disk, and the field is generated straight through the disk, rather than across its surface.

This way, you can make smaller dots closer together with fewer heads.

The downside is that the parallel arrangement is more complex to manufacture and so is more prone to mechanical failure. Think about it, it's a better design but it's more complicated, and consumers demand that the drives be ever more inexpensive. Something's gotta give, and I'm afraid that may be quality for the time being.

Really cool article on the subject...

[Marco]

Having 1 TB of mirrored SSD storage would probably kill SaW's and my budget put together... for a year.

The idea is neat, just not doable at the moment.


As to the quality of computer hardware, there have been shippings for every type of computer hardware from every manufacturer that have been bad. Sometimes it's a design issue, sometimes a production issue etc. I remember when people would laugh at you for buying IBM disks, Seagate disks, WD disks, Gigabyte mobos and so on. Frankly, it's a matter of luck.

[Shrink908]

Awesome, so should it just have to format a the new drive and then mirror the data?

JayJay: That's an awesome thought, but the last I knew they were very expensive and 64GB is the biggest they come.

Yeah.. When the new drive comes in I just have to pair it to the existing drive and "Synch" them... Then it'll be a normal RAID mirror..

[Triaxx]

Excellent.

[JayJay]

*Rubs hands together evilly* Soon, our plans for world domination will be complete, and once they are, we will demand the planet to surrend its supply of... NACOS! Booyahahahahaha!