On 12/23/2014 12:07 PM, Felix Miata wrote:
Anton Aylward composed on 2014-12-23 10:15 (UTC-0500):
For SMB/home users the large drives and the vendor's shift to drives that don't live forever as the old 20G and 30G drives seem to (we've discussed this before) can be uncomfortable.... *sigh* I'd run the OS/desktop from one of the 30G drives and everything else NFS'd/mirrored, even at home
I remember lots of discussions of non-reliability here, but none suggesting the era of 20G, 30G or 40G being better than others. A 30G may have been the first Quantum PATA I ever had to replace. I have here in my saved for their boards box several HDs in this class, WD300BB 2001-02-08, 20G Fireball Plus AS QMP20000AS, and a 5/8" tall made infamous by high failure rate in Dells 40G DiamondMax Plus 8 2003-10-18.
It's the 80Gs, 120Gs and moreso 160Gs that followed that I remember bailing us temporarily out of an era of frequent failures.
I've got about a dozen 20G and 30G drives pulled from SFF desktops, or are still in ones that are still going strong in my various 'under the desk' services such as DNS/DHCP, mailhub and LDAP/RADIUS. They've outlived a couple of 1T drives that seem to outlast the warranty period by only months. Yes, the 80G-120G I have are reliable, but those are in or from older laptops. They survive other parts of the laptop! I'm of the opinion that about 15-20 years ago engineers were pressured to make production line friendly drives. Last years when I had to take a drive in for recovery I had a long chat with the techs about reliability engineering and how things have changed over the years; it was a revelation. Statistical methods have taken over, not just at the gross level but at the micro level. The larger (>500G) drives are expected to have many defects and the first few tracks contain 'modules' to do with error handling. That's not just the alternate sectors but also the tables and microcode. Personally I think having them at the outer sectors is a bad idea since that's where a head retraction crash will -- as I found and the techs agreed -- cause damage. They said that's what happened to the drive I brought in. If the 'look-aside' stuff had been on the innermost tracks it would have been recoverable. Failure by lack of a robust design? I don't want to sound like a conspiracy nut-job but there was the general observation that modern drives seem engineered to match their warranty period and not much more. There are tales that Hank Ford The First went round to visit a junk yard to see what parts of old Ford cars survived and hence were "over-engineered". Probably apocryphal but it makes a point. I'm sure there would have been a transition point about 15 years ago and a great deal of instability in drive design. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org