Getting rid of the disks

[peroxidechicken]

Hard drives suck.

Oh, sure, they're several times faster and have thousands of times as much capacity as used to be normal, back in the days when most computers didn't have a hard drive at all. And, sure, they're cheap - 120Gb or more, as I write this, for the price of an unremarkable CPU. And modern drives are pretty reliable, and highly compatible with each other, and you haven't had to do low level formats or run head parking programs for years now.

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[Hooligan_DCS]

Reliable? Hardly

- Three IBM Deskstars (40gb), broken from 6 to 10 months each, to the same fault (model problem, something like 40% of the same were delivered back to IBM for replacements
- One Maxtor 40GB, replacement now running on this Pegasos. Me praying it will stay running for more than a year.
- One IBM 3.2GB I can't remember the model, replacement being used for Amithlon only.

These harddrives have died on three separate computers, two being used normally, one running as a server 24/7. Overheating has never been the cause.

That said, my Quantum 4GB drive is still 100% fully working, being years old, big and ugly ;-)

[bhoggett]

Well, I had both good and bad experiences with hard drives. Most have worked fine, and I've only lost two that caused any major data loss over the past 8 years or so.

Ironically, I have quite a few IBM Deskstars so maligned by everyone else, and they have performed admirably for me. Not so Western Digital. :-(

For now however, there is little choice as the artivle points out. Hard drives will be around for a while yet.

On a posting policy point, I'd like to request that news posters make it obvious when they include an external link to another site, and most importantly don't use "Read more..." as the text for this link. It is too easy to confuse this with the default "Read more" option that would normally reveal the rest of the news item. Please consider using something like "Read the full article at foonews.org" or something similar.

[commodore_jim]

It sounds like the guy who wrote this piece needs to get out more. Surely he could find something more worthwhile to complain about.

I've never heard of anything so ridiculous. Comparing the speed of a hard drive to RAM is preposterous. RAM is electronic whereas a hard disk has mechanical moving parts.

Of course it's going to be slower!!!!!!

It seems to me that we're so spoiled nowadays with ultra-powerful, cheap hardware that unless it happens five minutes ago when we click on the mouse, we're not satisfied.

[amigamad]

My 40 gig ibm hard drive has a problem that only lasted just over a year. The drives i have now all maxtors 20 40 and 120 gig and brand new unused 20 gig.For my a1 i have an 80 gig seagate not  used much at the moment no a1 and i have loads of small drives of 40mb to 500mb and these have nothing wrong with them. I think new drives are made as cheap as possible and reliabilty can be a joke why else would a manfacturer reduce warrantys from 3 to 1 year ? lots of people have dead hard drives and with a 120 gig drive thats full even useing dvd r drives to backup is going to be long and slow :-?

[bhoggett]

@amigamad

My 40 gig ibm hard drive has a problem that only lasted just over a year.

It does seem that most of the complaints have centered around this particular drive. I have to admit my IBM drives don't include this one, but all of them are still working fine, some of them after years of use.

he drives i have now all maxtors

Maxtors have been least reliable drives I've had overall, as well as generally being the poorest in terms of performance. I've now stopped buying them altogether.

I think new drives are made as cheap as possible and reliabilty can be a joke why else would a manfacturer reduce warrantys from 3 to 1 year ? lots of people have dead hard drives and with a 120 gig drive thats full even useing dvd r drives to backup is going to be long and slow

It's a fair point. Manufacturers - all of them - are cutting costs so drives in general are becoming less reliable. Then again, they do hold much more data than they did previously and operate at higher speeds and therefore temperatures. That's the price of progress.

Backing up is a problem, and always has been when the storage available was greater than that offered by the backup medium. It's no more practical to back up hard drives to DVD now than it was to back up hard drives to floppy in the days of the A1200.

With prices being much lower than before, it makes sense to mirror drives rather than back them up in the traditional manner. The chances of TWO drives failing at the same time are much less than those of ONE drive failing. I only use CDRs for permanent storage, never for backups.

As for the point of the original article, I dunno. What he says is fair enough, but it's stating the obvious, so why bother?

[The_Editor]

(Touching wood)

I use IBM deskstar (120gb) Maxtor(60gb x2) Fujitsu (60gb) and  a trusty old Quantum Viking scsi 2 f & W(4gb as a "Scratch drive")

All are giving good service in an NLE environment, cramped in my EZ tower (With extra bays welded in) alonside my A1200 with hardly ANY cooling fans...

Just one fan at the bottom.

[amigamad]

Until i get a maxtor die on me ill still buy them ive used them in a few pc,s ive built the 40 gig in the pc im using at the moment spends about 8 to 9 hours in use each day and sometimes ive had it running 3 days non stop .The ibm i had was an oem drive and was not a gxp which were known to have a lot of faults, even western digital hard drives seem to be unreliable. I know maxtors arnt the fastest but for me and my mates they have been reliable.samsung was worse than the ibm this tried to catch fire after 2 weeks use. i exchanged it for a maxtor.if my maxtors start dying ill start buying seagate drives . :-)

[Legerdemain]

Funny...   my soon 10-year old 170mb HD (can't come to think of what model), which I've used so freakily intesively on my A1200, is still top notch...   not that it is fast... and not that it is big... but heck, it is more reliable than (put in something extremely reliable here).

[Waccoon]

Reliable? Hardly

Ah, the good ol' IBM Deathstar...

I've bought three Maxtor drives, and my boss bought two, over the last year, and only one has not failed on us.  The Samsung drive in my OS/2 system is dying.  Our IBM Netfinity tower has had two drives (out of four) die in the last two years, and a third drive has developed about half a meg of bad sectors.  Hell, even one of our Adaptec RAID controllers has fried, and took two more hard drives with it!

Quantum and Hitachi sold off their HD divisions, and I believe Fujitsu is getting out of the HD market due to massive failure rates.  I've been very lucky with Western Digital drives, but I'm sure my new 1200JB will blow up any day now.   ;-)

My A1200 has an 85 MB Maxtor.  The thing is loud as a whistle, but it's lasted over ten years now with no bad sectors.

What's with the high failure rate?  Well, I heard it's not because of mechanical problems (with the exception of the Deathstar, which has crummy bearings).  I hear it's the electronics.  Form factor prevents manufacturers from using heatsinks on the chips, and they DO get pretty damn hot.  Putting a heatsink or cooler on the hard drive doesn't make much sense if the IC's are overheating.  I keep all my drives well-cooled, and still I get plenty of disk deaths.

It's a fair point. Manufacturers - all of them - are cutting costs so drives in general are becoming less reliable.

Time to market is a culprit, too.  I remeber reading an IBM tech arcticle where drive technology was taking 6 years to get from experimental research to market, and now the product cycle is closer to 18 months or less.

Damn the torpedoes!  Full speed ahead!

I only use CDRs for permanent storage, never for backups.

I used to say the same thing for 250MB tape drives!  The damn things never held data.  Of course, CD-R's are having problems, too.  "Laser rot" is a big problem, and every now and then I have a customer bring in a CDROM where the metal layer is peeling off the disk, and that's for good brands like PNY and TDK!

I just make multiple copies of my backups, and never throw any of them away.  You can't trust any media, really.

[Floid]

Fujitsu's recent problems were not from an overheating chip, but rather, one packaged in a bad epoxy (or some such thing) which had the unfortunate effect of reacting with the silicon.  Hearsay among friends battling the Deathstar 75GXP issue pointed to the 'pushing' of the electronics and firmware basis standard among the model line; supposedly the on-disk controller couldn't keep up with the data rate from the high-density platters in all cases.

I made the mistake of buying a WD800AB a while back, which appears to have some issues relating to power consumption, the automatic parking feature meant to kick in on voltage (and thus RPM) sag, or just life in general.  I never did get a chance to test it in a machine with a beefier supply.

Point is, it's tempting to blame heat, but we're equally up against complexity in general.  It's also amazing how IDE *hasn't* evolved; sure, some drives support TCQ and automatic remapping, but given the utilities provided with the WD, I'm fairly sure it lacked even the latter.  (I'll confess to never having found a proper SMART util to use with it, as well.)  Think about the tolerances necessary for today's data densities, and I'm fairly sure the mechanicals are an issue as well.  The prevalence of cheap RAID certainly can't be helping funding for reliability R&D.

Meanwhile, I can't seem to kill the noisy, hot, slow-for-7200RPM refurb Barracudas I picked up 5 years ago, despite the vibration of multiple road trips and their current swaddling in paper towels and packing tape.

---

And, uh, the article was written under the assumption that we all know HD latencies can be killer, and that 'flat' high-speed memories (MRAM?) could be the holy grail for a number of applications.  If anything, the conclusion that it's not as bad an issue as some might think is surprising.

[lorddef]

this is news? #### is it!

[gnarly]

I'm sorry, but I dont see the point of the article.

It says hard drives are sh1t. Compact flash isnt any use. Other solutions arent really available and/or useful to the consumer. Anyway, hard drives ROCK!

Or did I misread it? Pointless either way...

[Waccoon]

I'm sorry, but I dont see the point of the article.

The point is misplaced.  Hard drives are for storage, and all storage, by defenition, is much slower than memory (I hate it when people refer to hard drives as "memory").

It has more to do with how software is programmed these days.  If it sucks, don't use it.  If it's too slow, make your code smarter and deal with what resources you have.

At work, I use a Kodak DLS minilab photo printer.  The thing was pretty F***ing slow, considering it's a dual processor system with *TWO* pairs of striped SCSI hard drives.  The hardware is monsterous, but every time you scan a picture, the hard drives thrash like crazy.  So, being the idiot I am, I figured upgrading the server from 768 megs of RAM to 2 gigs of RAM would reduce the burdon on the hard drives.

When I finally ordered the memory and plugged it in, we saw absolutely *NO* increse in performance at all.  After sifting through various utilities, I found out the software is hard-coded to run with 768 megs of RAM, and won't use any more.  It's also programmed to buffer image data out to the hard drive after EVERY scan, so increasing the amount of memory doesn't affect performance at all, unlike "real" image editing programs, like Photoshop.

The only way to improve the performance of the machine is to swap in a faster hard drive, which I can't do because it will void our warantee.  If I try to remap the hard drives to allow for a RAM disk, the software pukes, because it will only write image data to a drive letter mapped to the Adaptec RAID array.  Just swapping a drive letter with another drive will make the system go ballistic, because it is specifically programmed only to work with certain pieces of hardware.  If the hardware doesn't match up, it ceases to function.  Gotta love proprietary systems -- built on PC hardware.

Wait... with all this hardware checking in place, does that mean the software is *TOO* smart?

[gnarly]

Wait... with all this hardware checking in place, does that mean the software is *TOO* smart?

So smart it becomes stupid? Its like Eddie Izzard's circle of cool:

looking crap, looking good, looking very good, looking cool, looking very cool, looking extremely cool, looking painfully cool, looking the coolest... looking like a dickhead, looking crap...

:-)