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

[Michael B. Trausch]

Warning:  I'm absolutely being curt, blunt, and overly direct in this 
message.  Mod me in the future if you want, but I'm really done with 
this bull.

Scroll way down if you care to read it at all.

Incidentally, I request that -chat be created if it hasn't yet. Else I 
think I'm pretty much done here.

And to lurkers and new people alike:  You've really nothing to fear from 
me.  I just tire of people who seem to spew the same type of crap month 
after month after month, even after this WHOLE list has attempted to 
help the poor soul.  Lurkers and new people need not read this post at all.


















































On 11/01/2013 03:38 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
> Hi Mike T, and all,
>
> Sorry.  You're welcome to your opinion but I couldn't disagree more.

I love how you take fact and make it opinion.  I guess that makes you 
feel better somehow?

> (And I'm not trying to pick a fight.)

LOL!

> 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.

As do I, and warranties have absofuckinglutely nothing to do with it.

> I have more than 6 hard drives in service here.

I have 17, not counting those I manage professionally (e.g., "out of my 
personal budget").  So?  That means work efficiently---unless you can't 
figure out how to do so.  You've specifically claimed years of 
"engineering experience" before on this list, so I have to assume that 
you're not as stupid as your words indicate.

I've spent less than 24 hours collectively in the last 2 years managing 
and replacing HDDs.  Again, not counting work.  And without using 
any---ANY---"high tech" knowledge.

> If, hypothetically, they all lasted 2 years, and if the worst case failure schedule occurred, I'd replacing drives every 6 months.

Yay!  You can do math!

> 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.

Then don't buy them at all.  Seriously.  Probabilities are a bitch, and 
if you don't like the probabilities of the stuff we have, then don't 
bother using it at all!

> It is short sited to reduce cost at all costs.

lol

> (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.

WTF are you on about?  Paying for the warranty has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO 
DO WITH THE PARTS ITSELF.

Perhaps consider getting off your soapbox and doing the math on 
warranties.  They make companies profit.  Big time.

> 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.

Huh?

I have zero idea what you're talking about here.  You're paying for a 
warranty, not "better" hardware.  With some exceptions, but I seriously 
doubt that you're buying data-center hardware.

> 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.

Oops.  The user manual on things is a good thing to have and read.

> 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.

These things do happen.  If you're going to expect a perfect experience 
with every unit you purchase in your life, well... you /are/ perpetually 
disappointed, so I guess nothing much changes.

> 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.

Funny thing about fuel pumps:  They're cooled by fuel.  Keep the tank > 
1/3 full, and they pretty much last forever.

But what would I know?  I've only seen the things destroyed by running 
empty a million and one times.  You might want to confirm by talking to 
an experienced mechanic, but that's hardly relevant to here.  Tends to 
be documented in the car's user manual, as well. Just checked for both 
my cars and this is indeed the case.  Knowing how to read is one thing; 
actually bothering to do so is quite another.

> 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.

Clearly you don't know much about fuel pumps.

I'm not going to say that I'm surprised, 'cuz, well, I'm not.

> 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.

Start up your own dictatoral regime so that you can enforce such 
draconian rules, and you'll be off to a good start.  Thankfully, what 
you propose could hold no water here.  At least, not for the next 15 or 
20 years yet, I think.

> As for drives exceeding their warranty,

HAH!  Back on topic!

>   that may be your experience, but it hasn't been mine.

Yeah, well.  I maintain my systems. *shrug*  I guess you don't.

>    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.

What the hell are you doing to your drives?  How often do you clean your 
cases?  I spend 15 minutes maintaining my computers about once every six 
months.  Honest, non-externally caused drive failure is pretty rare.  
Just ask Google.  They go through tons of them---because they beat the 
fucking shit out of them by exceeding their specs.

Anything will die quickly if you treat it badly enough.

> As for companies not being to make money producing a quality product, I don't buy it.

Sure you do.  Then you come here to bitch about it.

> They were producing quality, for the most part, until about 1980.

LOL!

Hard disk drives in the 80s and early 90s were so sensitive that simply 
tripping over a threshold between rooms would easily, EASILY destroy 
them---even at rest---if you forgot to park them.  Thankfully, today's 
drives are far smarter, and park themselves.

> 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.

Back up your assertions.  Do a teardown of a "2 year" and a "5 year" 
drive.  Come back when you've learned something about them with that 
engineering experience of yours.

> 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.

I still want to know what you're doing with your drives to kill them so 
quickly.  In 20 years, I've made 4---total---warranty claims on drives.  
INCLUDING professional work.  And I only replace drives when they die.  
Of course, because I can't afford downtime on even my own workstation, I 
use mirroring and backups to minimize the impact of a drive death.  
Fortunately, I rarely ever have to restore due to hard disk failure.  I 
more frequently have to restore due to software issues (Fedora 20 
Alpha... *cough*).

> 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.)

Offer proof, or quit it with the speculation.  It is getting really old.

> 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 don't buy any one vendor.  I have purchased WD, Samsung, Hitachi, 
Maxtor, and others over the years.  Of course, I've had DOA drives, too, 
but like anything else in the world, shit happens.

> 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.

Sucks for them.  The first time they lose important data, they learn.  
If they don't, well, that's /their/ problem.  We all know that hard disk 
drives are moving wear items.  Get over it.

> Some of my close family don't have backups unless I go do them.

And of course, you MUST do so, right?  Because if you don't, you'll feel 
responsible for their inability, right?

You know, even my parents know how to do their own backups.  And they 
don't know the first thing about a DOS prompt, a bash session, or 
whatever.  And I'm pretty sure they're older and less "engineery" than you.

> They simply won't spend several hours per month taking care of it.

And just why the hell would that be necessary?

> 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.

Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.  Teach a man to fish, he'll eat 
for a lifetime.

Of course, you can't teach someone to properly back things up if you 
can't do it yourslef, and from the sounds of it, you have no idea how to 
do regular, incremental backups yourself, so how could you teach others?

Hell, you could even install a program to automate the process. Finding 
that out is an excercise for you, though, because the free information 
you get out of this message is about the last I'm going to bother giving 
to you.

> 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.

Why would you run a full image backup of anything?  Do you not know how 
to back up just the data bits on the disk?  Why would you add the 
complexity of imaging if you're not working with a fleet of cloned 
systems?  Seriously?

> 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?

Absolutely.  I only had to learn my lesson once.

>    If the answer is yes, I applaud you.

Applauding expected practice that has been taught generally for 30 years 
is hardly appropriate.  It's like rewarding a 10 year old child for 
wiping his ass when he gets off the toilet.

>    Even it that's the case, I'll bet it would cause you an extreme hassle.

Nope.  On my primary workstation, it takes 180 minutes to restore, from 
start to finish, and I can use the system during the process. Given that 
we're talking about xz compressed data that fits on 100 GB of BD-R 
media, well, that's not bad at all.  But then again, unlike you, */I 
don't have time to fuck around with personal systems/*.  So, I make sure 
that I do things in a way that I don't have to.

Maybe if you listened to even 10% of the advice people gave you on this 
list---without making excuses for why you can't seemingly assimilate 
things that you've asked and had answered 100 times before---you might 
have better luck.

On anything else, the amount of data that is present on the system is so 
small that restorations take on the order of minutes.

I suggest you, err, engineer yourself some simpler solutions.

-- 

	Michael B. Trausch

President, *Naunet Corporation*
? (678) 287-0693 x130 or (855) NAUNET-1 x130
FAX: (678) 783-7843

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