Xeon Woodcrest Preys On Opteron

[George Macdonald]

with what nVidia Northbridge/Southbridge?

i mean, i've got the nForce Pro 2200/2050
(Northbridge/Southbridge)

i mean, is it the nForce4 software, or the hardware,
or both? the most recent d/l of the nForce4 software
for mine was a huge 41MB!

It's a err, "compatibility" problem and it seems to affect the use of
SATA-II with enhanced controllers + drivers, i.e. those that use special
hardware features to bypass much of the legacy bus -- ISA artifacts, PCI --
infrastructure and therefore some of the built-in Windows structures and
methods... and also enable NCQ.

"Compatibility" here would appear to mean that chipset and HDD mfrs first
stab at SATA II umm, missed on convergence. There's been a lot of talk
on various Web fora about this, MSI, nVidia, Asus, etc. (here's a sample
where the symptom is Error 51 in Event Log:
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/12946/?o=200) in relation to
nForce4 but the same complaints have been made by people using Intel
chipsets and IAA (Intel Application Accelerator) and even the Apple Mac
users have been having trouble; Google on "firmware 3.AAH" for some err,
stories.

i mean, i've got 3 Seagate 7200.9 SATA drives and
was planning to hook them up in my SuperMicro H8DCE.
but i'll be using them RAID 1E with a somewhat high end
(Areca ARC-1210) RAID adapter, so maybe i'll be OK?

AFAIK you should be OK and I know of one guy who was deep in the resolution
of the chipset/HDD firmware problems -- uses the moniker RogerP (note he
says he has a "brain disorder that impairs my language skills") -- who is
using an Areca controller in an nForce4 mbrd successfully. Here's a sample
of of some discussion at MSI's forum:
http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?topic=94547.msg688163

kindly provide a bit more detail on your situation

With all this talk and multiple firmware updates by Seagate, I'm in a
situation where HDTach is showing some weird results -- severe dips, not
just the odd spike, in sequential transfer rate for some zones of the disk
-- and I don't know whether it's the "incompatibility" or just OS
interference. The only way to be sure is to try to get the latest firmware
but Seagate is understandably cautious about issuing it and has tied the
upgrade(s) to the disk serial number to prevent widespread abuse. In many
cases it's also a multi-step upgrade so it's not simple: e.g. if you have
F/W 3.AAD, they send an upgrade to 3.AAE followed by the 3.AAH upgrade.

and any suggestions (for me) will be very welcome

If your disks have F/W 2AAA (no decimal pt. in that one ??) I'd get the
upgrade anyway - that was very early SATA II; if you have 3.AAD, it's a
toss-up; if you have 3.AAE it's supposed to be good... but the latest is
3.AAH. AIUI, one of the very early symptoms was that from a cold start,
the drive would come up in sleep-mode and take ~2mins to wake up.

of course, there's always "try it".

Yup and then you start to get "suspicions"... valid or not.

 

[willbill]

It's a err, "compatibility" problem and it seems to affect the use of
SATA-II with enhanced controllers + drivers, i.e. those that use special
hardware features to bypass much of the legacy bus -- ISA artifacts, PCI --
infrastructure and therefore some of the built-in Windows structures and
methods... and also enable NCQ.

you're running the 7200.9 SATA drives with
tagged cueing enabled coz they're
being used in a server?

with single user (me), the input i've
seen is to run them with NCQ disabled.
with Win XP Pro SP2, i've recently
checked "Disable tagged queuing" in
the disk drive part of Device Manager
(under SCSI Properties), but it ran
about the same (for many months) even
with it enabled. the 2nd check box
is "Disable synchronous transfers"
with i've never played with (currently
enabled)

fwiw, i also ordered a Raptor (which i haven't
yet got), and there's also TLER (which apparently
helps with their use in RAID, which i don't plan
on doing). Storagereview sez that the raptors
come with TLER disabled. of course, WD makes
no mention of whether they come enabled/disabled,
which probably results in some single user types
buying the X model (with the plastic window)

"Compatibility" here would appear to mean that chipset and HDD mfrs first
stab at SATA II umm, missed on convergence. There's been a lot of talk
on various Web fora about this, MSI, nVidia, Asus, etc. (here's a sample
where the symptom is Error 51 in Event Log:
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/12946/?o=200) in relation to
nForce4 but the same complaints have been made by people using Intel
chipsets and IAA (Intel Application Accelerator) and even the Apple Mac
users have been having trouble; Google on "firmware 3.AAH" for some err,
stories.




AFAIK you should be OK and I know of one guy who was deep in the resolution
of the chipset/HDD firmware problems -- uses the moniker RogerP (note he
says he has a "brain disorder that impairs my language skills") -- who is
using an Areca controller in an nForce4 mbrd successfully. Here's a sample
of of some discussion at MSI's forum:
http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?topic=94547.msg688163




With all this talk and multiple firmware updates by Seagate, I'm in a
situation where HDTach is showing some weird results -- severe dips, not
just the odd spike, in sequential transfer rate for some zones of the disk
-- and I don't know whether it's the "incompatibility" or just OS
interference. The only way to be sure is to try to get the latest firmware
but Seagate is understandably cautious about issuing it and has tied the
upgrade(s) to the disk serial number to prevent widespread abuse. In many
cases it's also a multi-step upgrade so it's not simple: e.g. if you have
F/W 3.AAD, they send an upgrade to 3.AAE followed by the 3.AAH upgrade.




If your disks have F/W 2AAA (no decimal pt. in that one ??) I'd get the
upgrade anyway - that was very early SATA II; if you have 3.AAD, it's a
toss-up; if you have 3.AAE it's supposed to be good... but the latest is
3.AAH. AIUI, one of the very early symptoms was that from a cold start,
the drive would come up in sleep-mode and take ~2mins to wake up.

i've got 3.AAE on the two that i'm running at
the moment (RAID 1 with the RAID chip that comes
with the Tyan 2875 mobo (Silicon Image 3114)),
and got a 3rd one this past month that i haven't
yet used

they do a very nice staggered spin-up
with no problems

Yup and then you start to get "suspicions"... valid or not.

i know what you mean.

fwiw, i never did find any malware.
but i've clearly got flakey dialup.
push finally came to shove for me,
and i've ordered an external 56K
Courier v.92

will that solve it? i'll know in a day
or two after i get it. it's a poke in
the dark way of trying to solve problems

(ass-u-me (ing) it's the old modem's fault))

too bad i gave my old v.90 Courier to a friend
(for free!) coz i see that used ones are
a popular item on the web (and command
a surprising amount of money)

bill

 

[George Macdonald]

you're running the 7200.9 SATA drives with
tagged cueing enabled coz they're
being used in a server?

The important point is that I'm using the enhanced chipset-specific drivers
which allow NCQ. I have one system which is a small Intranet Web
development server using a desktop mbrd, Asus A8N-E, with Athlon64 X2
4200+, 2GB ECC memory and two 200GB 7200.9s in NVRAID-1. Whether NCQ is a
benefit or not is moot but I left it turned on.

with single user (me), the input i've
seen is to run them with NCQ disabled.
with Win XP Pro SP2, i've recently
checked "Disable tagged queuing" in
the disk drive part of Device Manager
(under SCSI Properties), but it ran
about the same (for many months) even
with it enabled. the 2nd check box
is "Disable synchronous transfers"
with i've never played with (currently
enabled)

I'm not sure that synchronous transfers makes any difference to the SATA
controller - it's in the dialog box because of the SCSI driver chain
emulation. What the driver makes of it being disabled I dunno.

fwiw, i also ordered a Raptor (which i haven't
yet got), and there's also TLER (which apparently
helps with their use in RAID, which i don't plan
on doing). Storagereview sez that the raptors
come with TLER disabled. of course, WD makes
no mention of whether they come enabled/disabled,
which probably results in some single user types
buying the X model (with the plastic window)

Wouldn't you also require a RAID controller and driver which is capable of
dealing with TLER for it to be of any use? Do you know of any SATA RAID
controllers which claim to support this?

 

[willbill]

George Macdonald wrote:

i gather that Seagate does not offer these SATA 7200.9
firmware updates off of their web site?

once you've got the new firmware from them,
what do you do? boot into DOS (the one from Win 98),
and then run their DOS executable?

given that you've got the 7200.9 SATA drives running
off of a RAID controller, do you have to do anything else?

bill

 

[willbill]

Wouldn't you also require a RAID controller and driver which is capable of
dealing with TLER for it to be of any use?

i don't think so, but see below

Do you know of any SATA RAID
controllers which claim to support this?

e.g. at www.wdc.com i found (somewhere, sorry don't have the address)
2879-001165.pdf (a 2 page summary of the main 3 current Raptors
(but not the 150GB X Raptor, which afaik is spec'ed with 1/2 the
MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure))

<"RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER) — a feature unique
to WD, prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive
error-recovery processes common to desktop drives.">


to me, "unique to WD" tells me that it is unlikely to require
any advanced RAID controller

there's also an entire 2 page white paper writeup 2579-001098.pdf
which has more info, and which also states that TLER is also
included in their RE line of SATA hard drives (and presumably
also the still newer RE2) which includes:

<"ATA drives being "dropped" from a RAID volume was a commonly
heard complaint regardless of manufacturer of the hard drive
(that is, until WD delivered TLER). This error handling
"mis-coordination" is encountered when drives are under
a high I/O load such as a video surveillance server, a busy
e-mail server, or a busy web server. And under high I/O load,
the length of time needed to recover increases.

...

TLER-capable hard drives will perform the normal error recovery,
and after 7 seconds, issue an error message to the RAID controller
and defer the error recovery task until a later time. ... ">

bill

 

[George Macdonald]

i gather that Seagate does not offer these SATA 7200.9
firmware updates off of their web site?

Like I said they're tied to the serial numbers, so issued by special
request... which is my problem... getting th eescalation to work instead of
being told to run their diagnostic software.

once you've got the new firmware from them,
what do you do? boot into DOS (the one from Win 98),
and then run their DOS executable?

given that you've got the 7200.9 SATA drives running
off of a RAID controller, do you have to do anything else?

<shrug> Dunno but I'd assume it might be a .EXE which creates a DOS
bootable disk. Their normal diags create a Caldera DOS bottable disk.

 

[George Macdonald]

i don't think so, but see below




e.g. at www.wdc.com i found (somewhere, sorry don't have the address)
2879-001165.pdf (a 2 page summary of the main 3 current Raptors
(but not the 150GB X Raptor, which afaik is spec'ed with 1/2 the
MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure))

<"RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER) — a feature unique
to WD, prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive
error-recovery processes common to desktop drives.">


to me, "unique to WD" tells me that it is unlikely to require
any advanced RAID controller

Advanced or not, if TLER is going to send an error msg instead of a block
of data, the controller has to know what it means and the driver has to
know what to do instead of receiving the data.

 

[willbill]

Advanced or not, if TLER is going to send an error msg instead of a block
of data, the controller has to know what it means and the driver has to
know what to do instead of receiving the data.

i don't know much about Western Digital's TLER

i've told you what little i know

i only looked into it because of my interest
in a 150GB Raptor. btw, Newegg has a $40
mail-in rebate on them thru July 16.

given that you actually deal with servers and
RAID controllers and hard drives with them,
i suggest you look into it yourself

my own conclusion (hunch) is that it means little
for me, as a single user, for my own RAID usage

bill

 

[willbill]

TLER needs special RAID controller? was: Xeon ...
(Time Limited Error Recovery, a WD feature

Advanced or not, if TLER is going to send an error msg instead of a block
of data, the controller has to know what it means and the driver has to
know what to do instead of receiving the data.

did a bit more homework. there sure is a lot
of confusion out there about TLER, and WD isn't
doing much to help reduce it

still looks to me that a WD SATA drive that has
TLER will work just fine with non-RAID usage

TLER is intended for use with a *redundant* raid setup,
coz when an error is reported to the raid controller,
after 7 seconds, all that is going to happen is
recovery of that small bit of data from the good
part of the raid set. iow, it won't drop the
entire drive, which is what tends to happen when
the resonse takes more than 8 seconds

TLER is clearly NOT for use with raid-0 coz as soon
as it takes 7 seconds (or more) to respond to the raid
controller, an error gets sent to the controller (even
if it's only a slow response situation), and wham,
the raid-0 is gone

with a TLER drive that you are using as a normal (non raid)
disk, you might or might not lose a small bit of data

best answer i've seen so far is Eugene's #39, in the Q/A
response to his review of a SATA WD RE drive. see:
http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?s=adfe4fc157537bb10c1e4cf9a3fec62a&showtopic=20980&st=25

imho, the rest of the 4 pages isn't worth the time

even Eugene's #39 response leaves a number of
unanswered questions

about the only special thing you might need
with the raid controller is that it not drop
the drive when the drive reports an error,
but instead do a minor rebuild

at this point, afaict, it seems fairly clear that TLER
can be turned on and off, probably on all of WD's SATA
drives that have it. what is still unclear (to me)
is how this is actually done

bill

 

[J. Clarke]

TLER needs special RAID controller? was: Xeon ...
(Time Limited Error Recovery, a WD feature
on some of their SATA hard drives)

Geez, this is ludicrous. TLER is Western Digital Marketing Speak for "we're
too butt-headed to admit that we screwed up". The whole point of it is
that WD set the timeout on their drives so long that a drive would be
dropped out of a RAID as nonresponsive and dead during normal operation,
and rather than FIXING THE DAMNED THINGS they decided to make a new model
and charge extra for a shorter timeout.

 

[willbill]

willbill wrote:

Geez, this is ludicrous. TLER is Western Digital Marketing Speak
for "we're too butt-headed to admit that we screwed up".

the fact that TLER has been on WD's RE/RE2 SATA
hard drives for at least the last 12+ months
suggests that you may be right, but my hunch is
that it's more complicated than that

The whole point of it is that WD set the timeout on their drives
so long that a drive would be dropped out of a RAID as
nonresponsive and dead during normal operation, and rather than
FIXING THE DAMNED THINGS they decided to make a new model
and charge extra for a shorter timeout.

SATA drives appear (to me, with my very limited
1st hand experience) to be a very valid choice
for single use RAID sets

are SATA drives now becoming a real alternative
to more expensive SCSI drives for server RAID sets?

as well as the still unanswered question of does
TLER help within usage in a *server* RAID set?

bill

 

[Arno Wagner]

J. Clarke wrote:


the fact that TLER has been on WD's RE/RE2 SATA
hard drives for at least the last 12+ months
suggests that you may be right, but my hunch is
that it's more complicated than that

It is not. WD has serous enough troubles with read operations
that they need long recovery times occasionally. A reason to
stay away from their drives. BTW, Linux software RAID will drop
a drive on read errors, so WD drives (both variants) are essentially
unusable with it.

SATA drives appear (to me, with my very limited
1st hand experience) to be a very valid choice
for single use RAID sets

are SATA drives now becoming a real alternative
to more expensive SCSI drives for server RAID sets?

SATA is not SCSI. SCSI is still high-end (speed and reliability),
while SATA is consumer-grade. Still, is speed is not a primary
concern, an SATA RAID1/5/6 should be superiour to a single
SCSI drive today. And it may be cheaper as well.

as well as the still unanswered question of does
TLER help within usage in a *server* RAID set?

Stay away from WD, especially in servers. Use SCSI wehn
you need high reliability and can pay for it. Use Seagate,
Samsung, Hitachi, when SCSI is too expensive.

Arno

 

[George Macdonald]

the fact that TLER has been on WD's RE/RE2 SATA
hard drives for at least the last 12+ months
suggests that you may be right, but my hunch is
that it's more complicated than that




SATA drives appear (to me, with my very limited
1st hand experience) to be a very valid choice
for single use RAID sets

are SATA drives now becoming a real alternative
to more expensive SCSI drives for server RAID sets?

That's an interesting question and Seagate now has their Nearline-class
SATA drives targeted at "entry level servers". Quite what the difference
is, is hard to tell but I'm sure the mfrs are concerned that high ASP
devices might be on the decline. OTOH, how do you tell the desktop sector
that you have a better SATA drive but it's really not targeted at their
systems?

 

[willbill]

It is not.

^^^^^^^^^

excuse me?

WD has serous enough troubles with read operations
that they need long recovery times occasionally. A reason to
stay away from their drives. BTW, Linux software RAID will drop
a drive on read errors, so WD drives (both variants) are essentially
unusable with it.



SATA is not SCSI. SCSI is still high-end (speed and reliability),
while SATA is consumer-grade. Still, is speed is not a primary
concern, an SATA RAID1/5/6 should be superiour to a single
SCSI drive today. And it may be cheaper as well.




Stay away from WD, especially in servers.

again, excuse me

do you actually support WD SATA drives
that are used in real server RAID setups?

Use SCSI wehn
you need high reliability and can pay for it. Use Seagate,
Samsung, Hitachi, when SCSI is too expensive.

do you have any clue as to how many *server*
RAID setups actually now use SATA HDD?

if so, kindly post a link.

bill

 

[willbill]

That's an interesting question

i'll take that as a compliment.

i suspect that SATA drives are now
starting to be used in real server
RAID sets, but i don't know it for sure

but i've also been out of IT for the
last 11 years (last was a very large
Sun setup). i mean, what does
www.newegg.com use for raid (assumming
that they use raid) in their servers?
SCSI or less expensive SATA? and what
does www.anandtech.com use for raid in
their servers? not to mention, what does
either of them use for the CPU? x86 or
dual/quad core or what?

the latest www.anandtech.com storage review
(on a WD RE16 drive 2 weeks ago), made
mention of doing a followup review of
raid issues (which might or might not
comment on WD TLER)

problem is i don't trust anandtech on an issue
like this, but their comments might well be
worth looking at and thinking about, when it
shows up (presumably in the next 4 weeks)

and Seagate now has their Nearline-class
SATA drives targeted at "entry level servers".

not to mention, how would one benchmark SATA
HDD "drop out" when used in a raid set?

i can't think of any easy way

to me, it's more of a seat of the pants issue for
those who actually use/support real *server* raid
arrays that actually use SATA drives; and i rather
suspect that this is still rare at this point

Quite what the difference
is, is hard to tell but I'm sure the mfrs are concerned that high ASP

"ASP" = ?

devices might be on the decline. OTOH, how do you tell the desktop sector
that you have a better SATA drive but it's really not targeted at their
systems?

this may be why WD is so confusing on the subject
of TLER with their current RE/RE2/Raptor drives

i mean hey, i ordered a normal 150 GB Raptor
(for non raid use), and i expect it to show up
with TLER turned off. and if not, that i can
turn it off (if it shows up turned on)

i've also got two WD RE drives, but IDE (not SATA),
and i rather like them better than my IDE 7200.9
drives (their physical construction, and how they
don't "ping" when i tap them with my fingertip.
i mean, they both come with 5 year warranties.)

(i have both IDE/SATA 7200.9 drives, which are,
from the bottom, difficult/impossible to tell
them apart)

bill

 

[daytripper]

i suspect that SATA drives are now
starting to be used in real server
RAID sets, but i don't know it for sure

[...]

They are. For one example, Stratus uses SATA drives in Raid 1+0 on their model
5700 - which is a fault tolerant 2P dual-core server, no less. A real
*serious* server...

http://www.stratus.com/products/ftserver/software.htm

/daytripper

 

[Arno Wagner]

excuse me?

I think your hunch is incorrect.

again, excuse me

do you actually support WD SATA drives
that are used in real server RAID setups?

No. I think WD is behind the other manufacturers both
in reliability and in design. The only thing they have going
for them is speed. Speed is not enough to make up for their
other problems.

do you have any clue as to how many *server*
RAID setups actually now use SATA HDD?

Oh, I know. I have some servers with a few TBs in
SATA and ATA myself. But these are medium reliability,
medium speed set-ups, and I do not have the money for SCSI.

I am just cautioning you to not consider SATA the equal of
SCSI. I know that many vendors will happily claim that
today SATA is equal to SCSI at a lower price. They are lying
to boost sales.

if so, kindly post a link.

Link? To what?

Arno

 

[Tony Hill]

SATA drives appear (to me, with my very limited
1st hand experience) to be a very valid choice
for single use RAID sets

are SATA drives now becoming a real alternative
to more expensive SCSI drives for server RAID sets?

Given that virtually all servers are now offered with the option of
SATA drives rather, I would say that yes, it is a real alternative to
SCSI for servers for operations that aren't really disk intensive.
SCSI does still seem better able to handle the really disk intensive
stuff better, particularly with regards to having LOTS of small,
independent disk reads/writes. However there are plenty of server
setups where this isn't such a big worry, especially given that you
usually want your server running almost entirely out of RAM instead of
disks anyway.

Also, the real key difference between SATA and SCSI has very little to
do with the interface and a LOT to do with target markets. In much
the same way that there's no technical reason why SATA drives are
almost all 7200 rpm while SCSI drives are almost all 10K or 15K rpm,
there's also absolutely nothing in SCSI that would make the drive any
more reliable and even the performance differences, at equal RPMs and
cache, are as much to do with different optimizations in the firmware
than differences in the interface. This is why SCSI drives are almost
always slower than similar-spec SATA drives for "desktop" style
applications (larger sequential read/writes), but the reverse is true
for "server" style applications (smaller non-sequential read/writes).

The new thing these days from the big three (or is it only two now?)
hard drive companies is their "Enterprise" class SATA drives. The
theory being that these are SATA drives designed for servers, though
the difference at the moment seems to be more marketing than anything
else. Still I would expect the trend to continue. Basically these
drives are going to replace all the server roles that might otherwise
been served by a 7200rpm SCSI drive, or possibly even 10Krpm SCSI
drives. There will still be a market for 15Krpm SCSI and Serial
Attached SCSI drives, but the low-end will probably move towards SATA.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

It is not. WD has serous enough troubles with read operations
that they need long recovery times occasionally. A reason to
stay away from their drives.

BTW, Linux software RAID will drop a drive on read errors,

so WD drives (both variants) are essentially unusable with it.

Oh goodie, that must be really bad, right?
Like that won't happen with drives of other makes when they exhibit
read errors. Not to mention that one would even want them to not be
dropped if they exhibited read errors.

SATA is not SCSI.

No kidding. Maybe that's why they name it differently then.

SCSI is still high-end (speed and reliability), while SATA is consumer-grade.

Clueless, 'as always'.

Still, is speed is not a primary concern, an SATA RAID1/5/6 should be su-
periour to a single SCSI drive today.

Utter nonsense on the access aspect of 'speed'.

 

[George Macdonald]

i'll take that as a compliment.

i suspect that SATA drives are now
starting to be used in real server
RAID sets, but i don't know it for sure

I think that's the point of the Caviar RE line and the Seagate Nearline
class. Obviously there's a market for an uprated SATA drive; remember the
Deskstars which were rated for a max hours per monthly cycle a couple of
years back? On top of the click of death saga, finished them off.

but i've also been out of IT for the
last 11 years (last was a very large
Sun setup). i mean, what does
www.newegg.com use for raid (assumming
that they use raid) in their servers?
SCSI or less expensive SATA? and what
does www.anandtech.com use for raid in
their servers? not to mention, what does
either of them use for the CPU? x86 or
dual/quad core or what?

the latest www.anandtech.com storage review
(on a WD RE16 drive 2 weeks ago), made
mention of doing a followup review of
raid issues (which might or might not
comment on WD TLER)

problem is i don't trust anandtech on an issue
like this, but their comments might well be
worth looking at and thinking about, when it
shows up (presumably in the next 4 weeks)




not to mention, how would one benchmark SATA
HDD "drop out" when used in a raid set?

i can't think of any easy way

to me, it's more of a seat of the pants issue for
those who actually use/support real *server* raid
arrays that actually use SATA drives; and i rather
suspect that this is still rare at this point

I'm not sure on that - corporate computing is moving into the glasshouse,
departmental servers are verboten in the brave new, security oriented
computing world so enterprise-class drives will have their place. OTOH
there are many more SMB servers than enterprise ones and for a less than
critical application, like say an Intranet Web Server, many smaller
businesses will be content to have an uprated drive like Caviar RE or
Seagate Nearline SATA RAID-1 array for "reliable enough".

"ASP" = ?

Average Selling Price.

this may be why WD is so confusing on the subject
of TLER with their current RE/RE2/Raptor drives

i mean hey, i ordered a normal 150 GB Raptor
(for non raid use), and i expect it to show up
with TLER turned off. and if not, that i can
turn it off (if it shows up turned on)

i've also got two WD RE drives, but IDE (not SATA),
and i rather like them better than my IDE 7200.9
drives (their physical construction, and how they
don't "ping" when i tap them with my fingertip.
i mean, they both come with 5 year warranties.)

I got a Caviar SE in an emergency from a local store a while back and
couldn't wait to get it outa there, when the replacement Seagate arrived -
horrible throbbing drone which about drove me nuts. OTOH, it's taken
Seagate a while to realize that SMT components should be on the inside of
the PCB. Nasty story there where, after swapping drives in and out of
drive cages a few times, I got things all put back together, only to find a
SM capacitor lying on the desk.<gack>