Hard drive terminology question

[Paul]

It's a shame from what other posters said that quality has slipped. My
expectations were that whatever drive I buy, as long as I chose a
manuf. with a good reputation for making quality drives, the drive
should last a very long time, especially because I don't run apps that
work my eqpt to their limits.

John

I replace drives when they start to make me nervous. And that
happens after around a year or so on average. Either I start to
see something in the SMART stats, or the HDTune benchmark
is wrong, or I hear a sound at startup that didn't used to be
there. I no longer run them until they fail, mainly because
I don't do backups every day.

Like yourself, I've had older, lower capacity drives
last a long time. I have some small SCSI drives that
still work. With those, they get noisy enough to be
retired because they're annoying (those are ball bearing
drives, rather than the modern fluid dynamic bearing ones,
but they aren't as likely to seize up as the FDB ones). But
I can still dig those out and do test installs.

I think the longest I had a drive last, was around 7 years
of 24x7 (at work, on a UNIX box - box was never turned off).
I doubt I'll be seeing any of today's 1TB drives last anywhere
near that long.

But even the old drives had some pretty spectacular failure
modes. I had a 2GB SCSI drive fail on me, and at power up,
I heard a sound like a wind up clock main spring -- "sproing".
That was the head assembly being ripped to shreds on the
landing ramp. The drive had a head lock, and I guess something
was still in the way. A fun way to lose 2GB of data.

Paul

 

[RayLopez99]

I replace drives when they start to make me nervous. And that
happens after around a year or so on average. Either I start to
see something in the SMART stats, or the HDTune benchmark
is wrong, or I hear a sound at startup that didn't used to be
there. I no longer run them until they fail, mainly because
I don't do backups every day.

Since mean time for failure on a modern drive is five years, seems you
are jumping the gun. And SMART stats--how do you manually monitor
them? I just let the BIOS figure out when some threshold is crossed
and failure is imminent.

RL

 

[Paul]

Since mean time for failure on a modern drive is five years, seems you
are jumping the gun. And SMART stats--how do you manually monitor
them? I just let the BIOS figure out when some threshold is crossed
and failure is imminent.

RL

Use HDTune free version, for SMART. I haven't tested this
on Windows 7, but use this on WinXP/Win2K.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

Paul

 

[Flasherly]

It's a shame from what other posters said that quality has slipped. My
expectations were that whatever drive I buy, as long as I chose a
manuf. with a good reputation for making quality drives, the drive
should last a very long time, especially because I don't run apps that
work my eqpt to their limits.

SCSI - never ran w/ them, but they've a step-up reputation closer to
industrial or commercial use. I've had bad drives. IBM, Seagate, WD.
All IDEs. The Seagates and WD were 1 year warranty but bought new and
well taken care of, which kind of burst my bubble and put me in touch
with the fact that reviews and reputation only go so far. Hence the
Samsungs, though did get one Seagate out of necessity. Not really much
sense to that, either, if I'm just a fundamentalist these days: The
day after the first computer was sold backups were invented.

 

[John]

SCSI - never ran w/ them, but they've a step-up reputation closer to
industrial or commercial use. I've had bad drives. IBM, Seagate, WD.
All IDEs. The Seagates and WD were 1 year warranty but bought new and
well taken care of, which kind of burst my bubble and put me in touch
with the fact that reviews and reputation only go so far. Hence the
Samsungs, though did get one Seagate out of necessity. Not really much
sense to that, either, if I'm just a fundamentalist these days: The
day after the first computer was sold backups were invented.

When it came time to replace the SCSI drives, I switched back to IDE
drives because SCSI IIRC were about 2.5 times the cost of IDE drives
and it seemed to me that IDE drives were closing the performance gap.

John

 

[Flasherly]

When it came time to replace the SCSI drives, I switched back to IDE
drives because SCSI IIRC were about 2.5 times the cost of IDE drives
and it seemed to me that IDE drives were closing the performance gap.

These new "-- IDE --" drives look for OS HBA characteristics. „ And,
that ain't talkin' XP none and at all. . .

Windows 7 and Windows Vista 32-bit support HDs greater than 2.19 TB
for **secondary storage only**.

Windows 7 and Windows Vista 64-bit support is both primary and
secondary storage, in addition to provisionally enabled BIOS UEFI
support for booting capabilities.

Newegg maxes out with a SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM SATA
3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive for $69.99 (until
5/24). Item #: N82E16822152245

When they're all gone, someday, what's left will be rebadged into
whatever WD is doing (the two lines above are off WD spec sheets). A
$250 OS and whatever a new UEFI motherboard runs to straight across
meet "compliance" specs.

 

[Nobody > (Revisited)]

Typical L00pez 99

Another blue collar potty mouth shiite head spouting. I'll humor him
by answering.

Aha.. Ray's an elite snob.

They do. They are expensive to get (to wine and dine the ISO people
is the least of it) and if you can afford to go through the process it
shows your organization does have some minimum threshold of quality
control.

It appears that Ray's been doing shady stuff as well (not uncommon with
elitists)

Interesting... could that be the reason why 'ISO 9000' got the bad rep?
I've been at least "somewhat involved" with a fair number of awarded ISO
9000 certs. None have gone to the "wine and dine".

No. Your non-existent kollege degree is "just paper", not even as
good as toilet paper.

Some me where I've ever said I have a degree.

Defer to Paul for evidence? Lame.

Paul is pretty much the "alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt" guru. I don't
have the cool/calm/collected persona..

And BIOS screwups is not

necessarily evidence of SMART failure. At the very least the BIOS
should flash a 1 second warning on boot that your HD are about to
fail. More likely Windows 7 itself would read the BIOS and give you a
warning.

Your choice of wording here. The example I gave wouldn't have said diddly.

AIDS? You have AIDS? No surprise.

Oh whee... what's next; the "pedobear".

Professional incompetence noted. So? You use dodgy hardware.

So how do you find out if what you bought is "dodgy hardware" until
after you find the fail? Crystal ball?

You have a bad memory.

The memory thing? I can admit that.


I can recall stuff from 10 years ago like it

was yesterday.

Csn you remember shitting a "Ray Lopez" on 3/24/2000 in the AM? Was it nice?

Then again I'm in a higher paying field than you with

a higher IQ too.

OOOHHH.. I'm now inferior. Nice try.

This is not the time or place to get into test vectors with you, and
how it is nearly mathematically impossible to test for every single
possibility in a modern IC chip--Paul would know more than you. But
given the time constraints faced on an assembly line I think the HD
makers do a good job.

It appears that you do see that I can speak on that

Boring renaissances about some transistor radio and a brown-eyed girl
by a brown-nosed boy noted. Your point?

You obviously missed the point; which is "why does anything work anymore"

You go from one extreme to another. "All possible problems" and then
"beta test". What a fool you are. Every final release of hardware
and software has at least one actual or theoretical bug, including the
hardware and software you have in a commercial airplane. The trick is
to minimize these and have backup. It's all about cost/performance,
which you know nothing about. Go back to fixing cars Bubba.

RL

--
"Shit this is it, all the pieces do fit.
We're like that crazy old man jumping
out of the alleyway with a baseball bat,
saying, "Remember me motherfucker?"
Jim “Dandy” Mangrum