[ale] [semi OT] encouraging and discouraging HDD and SSD observations

Fri Nov 1 18:08:11 EDT 2013

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) <
atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> wrote:

> Hi Mike T, and all,
>
> Sorry.  You're welcome to your opinion but I couldn't disagree more.  (And
> I'm not trying to pick a fight.)  All the computer maintenance I do is of
> my personal machines and my family's personal machines.  When things break,
> the time, and the money, and fuel to get there and back, has to come out of
> my personal budget, which is minimal.  Nobody pays me to get this stuff
> done.  I, and my family, routinely run HDD's over 5 years, when they'll
> last that long.
>
>
I don't find hard drives useful for more than ~3 years -- either due to
space constraints or a desire for faster speed.  But your desire is
understandable.

> I have more than 6 hard drives in service here.  If, hypothetically, they
> all lasted 2 years, and if the worst case failure schedule occurred, I'd
> replacing drives every 6 months.  In another worst case failure schedule,
> I'd have to replace 4 at once or something.  I have neither the time, nor
> the money to mess with that.
>
> It is short sited to reduce cost at all costs.  (Making the following
> numbers up.)  A $ 60 hard drive is no bargain to me if I have to spend an
> extra 2 days replacing it twice more in the next 5 years.  I would FAR
> rather pay $ 100 for that same hard drive to double or triple the
> longevity.  The hassle factor of messing with it more often is much more of
> an issue than the extra $ 40 I pay for the product.  I'm not by any means
> rich, but if you buy too cheap, you pay the price in other ways.
>
> The companies are basically producing crap relevant to what they did in
> the past, and it's the WRONG direction to be going in.  I just not long ago
> retired a dehumidifier at home that had lasted for my wife (before I met
> her) and for us together for a combined total of 20 years.  Had I known the
> fan motor bearing had a grease port (which I didn't), it might have lasted
> another 10 years.  I bought a fancy new Sears unit with electronic controls
> and I had it back in the shop in about a year because of a controller
> failure.  This is totally ridiculous.  For another example of the cost of
> cheap parts, my Dad has just installed his 3rd fuel pump in his vehicle
> within a couple of months.  Every time this happens, he incurs a towing
> bill.  The mechanic says they can't get good parts from the factories in
> China.  It is difficult for my Dad to afford OEM or something like a Bosch
> pump at 4X the price, and now that the first one was put in, the mechanic
> wants to put in the same thing !
>  again so he can make a warranty claim.
>

Is your claim now that "all manufacturing is crap," or are these unrelated?

>
> Even the cheapest thing on the market should be mandated to be of
> reasonable quality, and you shouldn't have these runs of bad from the
> factory products.  How to do that, I have no idea.
>
> As for drives exceeding their warranty, that may be your experience, but
> it hasn't been mine.  Just in the last few years, I've had to replace 3 or
> more (I've really lost count) Seagate 1 TB 5 yr drives because they started
> throwing bad sectors after 2-3 years, and I'm about to have to do another.
>  Some of the replacements are refurbs (you don't have a choice) and they
> seem to fail even more often.  So, I get to waste part of another day
> replacing another drive and transferring data and being without the use of
> the pc on a drive that shouldn't even be failing in the first place at this
> time.
>
> "shouldn't even be failing": based on what evidence?

> As for companies not being to make money producing a quality product, I
> don't buy it.  They were producing quality, for the most part, until about
> 1980.  If the consumers want 2 year $ 60 drive with relatively crappy
> quality, then the factories can give it to them.  And, those consumers will
> pay the price later in hassle.  Personally, I wouldn't even want to play in
> that market, as I would feel I was doing a disservice to the customer.
>  Regardless, the factory should still offer a higher quality product with a
> 5 year warranty, and yes it will be more expensive.  So be it.
>

Hard drive technology today and in the 1980s are simply not comparable.  It
makes no sense to compare them.

> So, the hdd I'm about to replace will be going back to Seagate under
> warranty, and it may even be the 3rd replacement under the original serial
> number.  If that's the case, the drive I'm getting will be the 3rd one I've
> had to use to provide the 5 years of service that they promised.
>

Seagate seems to be holding up their end of the bargain by replacing your
drives.

> As Mike Holmes on Home and Garden TV network would say, if it isn't done
> (built) right, it's unacceptable.  And, in my opinion, the products in the
> HDD and SDD market they're putting out now are not done right.  (Perhaps,
> apparently, the fuel pump market too.)
>
> When I have to buy another drive with my own money, you can BET that I'll
> be selecting a WD Black HDD or a Samsung Pro SSD or equivalent with a 5
> year warranty for two very good reasons:  A) I don't want the hassle of
> messing with it again for 5 years, and B) if I do have the hassle of
> messing with it again before that, I CERTAINLY don't want to pay for the
> drive again.
>
> I agree that you should always have good enough backups to not lose any
> data in a failure.  That said, most people, ie average people usually don't
> have backups at all or have severely outdated ones.  Some of my close
> family don't have backups unless I go do them.  They simply won't spend
> several hours per month taking care of it.  So, in some cases, since I know
> they'd be heart broken if they lost 3000 valuable photos, and since I know
> it would be a much larger problem for me to restore the pc without a
> backup, I go do it for them.  In my own case, since I have a number of
> PC's, I do well to have a full image backup that is within 1-3 months old.
>  I do have online backup that runs every 6 hours on the data though.
>
> Just out of curiosity, and again, I'm not picking a fight, do you eat your
> own dogfood regarding backups?  If every HDD you own and every HDD you're
> responsible for vanished today, would you be able to recover all the
> critical data and all the important data and only lose trivial data, if
> that?  If the answer is yes, I applaud you.  Even it that's the case, I'll
> bet it would cause you an extreme hassle.
>

No, of course not, if I lost every HDD I own/am responsible for, I'd be in
trouble.  But the odds of that are exceedingly unlikely, given an adequate
backup strategy.

Given services like Crashplan, SpiderOak, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Mozy,
there's no reason anyone should be without a backup plan.  If they are,
they shouldn't be surprised when they lose data.

If you really don't want to lose data to a drive failure, use RAID.  (Note:
RAID is not a backup, but can reduce/eliminate data loss in a *drive
failure.*)

>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron
>
>
>
> "Michael B. Trausch" <mbt at naunetcorp.com> wrote:
>
> >On 10/31/2013 10:00 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
> >> So, discouraging observation: it is now almost impossible to find any
> >HDD or SSD with a warranty of more than 2-3 years.  Are they KIDDING?
> >
> >No, they're not.
> >
> >You replace drives when they fail.
> >
> >If an HDD manufacturer offered a 10 year warranty, they'd be out of
> >business *very* quickly.  The fact that they no longer offer 5 year
> >warranties is a _/*good*/_ thing, reducing cost for us all.  In my
> >experience, if a drive runs for one year, 24x7, without fault, then it
> >is likely to continue to do so for the next 9.  OTOH, drives that power
> >
> >off and on a lot, will die much sooner.
> >
> >Anyway, if you're rich enough to depend on warranties or only use
> >things
> >in-warranty, well, to each their own.  The only warranty I care about
> >on
> >a hard disk is 12 to 18 months.  Outside of that, I've probably had to
> >retire it due to growth anyway, my current set of HDDs being the
> >exception.
> >
> >Most HDDs drive well outside of warranty if treated properly.  SSD is
> >flash-based and has its downsides, too, including bitrot (albeit
> >differently than on magnetic media).
> >
> >This is entirely the wrong industry to want long warranties in.  You
> >only need a warranty long enough to burn in the hardware and use it for
> >
> >a little while.  All other stability should come from your backups.
> >All.
> >
> >     --- Mike
> >
> >--
> >
> >       Michael B. Trausch
> >
> >President, *Naunet Corporation*
> >? (678) 287-0693 x130 or (855) NAUNET-1 x130
> >FAX: (678) 783-7843
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
>
> Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9 Mail.
> Please excuse my potential brevity if I'm typing on the touch screen.
>
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
> call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
> mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very
> quickly.)
>
> Ron Frazier
> 770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT techstarship.com
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>
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-- 
David Tomaschik
OpenPGP: 0x5DEA789B
http://systemoverlord.com
david at systemoverlord.com
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