The state of the hard drive industry

They are the cheapest locally or you can look at patriot which have many of the latest ranges.

I wish i could afford to buy a SSD. :(
 
Arthur said:
Arthur's Corollary to Moore's Law: Data always expands to 110% of available storage.
HDD capacity is always insufficient.
Click to expand...

Some interesting facts on older platen HDD from; Gibson Research Corporation

Why Drives Die

We put a man on the moon, and a motorized skateboard on Mars ... So why can't we make a failure-proof disk drive? The answer, of course, is that we could. But the question is whether manufacturers should? You know that a more reliable drive is going to cost somewhat more to make, and therefore needs to sell for a higher price. But you can't SEE the reliability of a drive when you look at it. They all appear to be pretty much the same, so there's no way to tell that one drive will be more reliable than another.

Thus, from the perspective of the manufacturer, putting more reliability into their drives is wasted money, since no one will buy their drives for that reason. If one drive costs 20% more than another, say $239 instead of $199, and the drives are the same size and seem identical, wouldn't everyone save the $40 and happily take home a new drive for $199? Of course.

That's why, when you're in the business of making hard drives the first thing you learn is that ...
Reliability Isn't Profitable!
Therefore, NOT ONE DIME is spent on RELIABILITY beyond the barest minimum required. What we get instead, are drives that work "well enough" and are equipped with multi-year warranties to cover the percentage that statistically die sooner than is reasonable.

But what IS reasonable? Your prematurely dead drive is replaced for free. Thank you very much. But what about your data? Nope. There's no guarantee for your data. It's gone forever. Period. And if your drive happens to statistically outlive its warranty, then when it dies you still lose all of your data ... and your drive too.

It's clear that if you care about the data on your system's drives you must think of your drives as HIGHLY VOLATILE storage that's been manufactured as cheaply as possible. And since the drive's manufacturer won't take any responsibility for your data ... YOU must.

Also see:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf - "One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent
pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels."

"This result suggests that SMART models are more useful in predicting trends for large aggregate populations than for individual components. It also suggests that powerful predictive models need to make use of signals beyond those provided by SMART."

"We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors."

&

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bianca/fast07.pdf - "That is, replacement rates in our data grew
constantly with age, an effect often assumed not to set in until after a nominal lifetime of 5 years."

"Observation 1: Variance between datasheet MTTF and disk replacement rates in the field was larger than we expected. The weighted average ARR was 3.4 times larger than 0.88%, corresponding to a datasheet MTTF of 1,000,000 hours.

Observation 2: For older systems (5-8 years of age), data sheet MTTFs underestimated replacement rates by as much as a factor of 30.

Observation 3: Even during the first few years of a system’s lifetime (< 3 years), when wear-out is not expected to be a significant factor, the difference between datasheet MTTF and observed time to disk replacement was as large as a factor of 6.

Observation 4: In our data sets, the replacement rates of SATA disks are not worse than the replacement rates of SCSI or FC disks. This may indicate that disk independent factors, such as operating conditions, usage and environmental factors, affect replacement rates more than component specific factors. However, the only evidence we have of a bad batch of disks was found in a collection of SATA disks experiencing high media error rates. We have too little data on bad batches to estimate the relative frequency of bad batches by type of disk, although there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that bad batches are not unique to SATA disks."


Own Comment: Off Topic

Does USA's exported capitalism / consumerism, really lead to improved products at more competitive pricing and is this worth giving up our humanity?

It reminds me of another article - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1266643/Microsofts-Chinese-workforce-tired-stay-awake.html
 
Last edited:
I had to laugh at the thought that my old 20MB hard drive from 1985 would be able to store exactly one podcast (plus a few e-mails) in 2010!

who.is.michael said:
Some interesting facts on older platen HDD from; Gibson Research Corporation
Click to expand...

Some interesting comments about reliability, but the same applies to any modern technology! Replace the word hard-drive with engine, and you'll see why modern jets have 4, not 2 or 1. In the movie 'The Right Stuff' the astronaut Alan Shepard is quoted as saying that every part of this rocket was built by the lowest bidder...

If your data is valuable, keep a (or multiple) copies, preferably off-site.

BTW: Stuff that you download is, by definition, a copy from somewhere else!
 
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