7 ms·

I read that as 'for critical applications, buy a competitor's drive.' Perhaps reading comprehension is limited on my part. The key thing I want from a drive is

by wegs 7y ago

I read that as 'for critical applications, buy a competitor's drive.' Perhaps reading comprehension is limited on my part. The key thing I want from a drive is reliability. I don't want to lose my data. That far beats size, noise, speed, cost, or just about anything else in what I will shop on. A drive that loses data will cost my thousands of dollars. My perception of reliability comes down to trust and transparency.If I can't trust a drive maker, I won't buy from them. WD just went into my don't-trust don't-buy pile. I actually don't have any non-critical applications. If my mom's laptop hard drive fails, that's still thousands of dollars of my time helping her. It's no less important than enterprise (indeed, I'd argue more, since she doesn't have RAID).

StillBored 7y ago
Yah, so they have come somewhat clean about SMR, but they have a lot of other bits they have been hiding. Some of it in plain sight. "5400 RPM class" which means what exactly? And of course the whole desktop vs nas differentiation was the early return on error logic being hard coded instead of configurable by the OS/RAID. Remove a feature charge more..
glitchc 7y ago
WD bought out Hitachi's storage business in 2012, so those Ultrastars are still their own, albeit different branding.
- AnonC 7y ago
  Hitachi drives (not the NAS category) have been at the top of Backblaze’s annual hard drive reliability charts for several years even after the WD acquisition. So that division is still churning out drives that are better than the WD branded drives.
  - Tijdreiziger 7y ago
    They're now all branded WD.
  - glitchc 7y ago
    An Ultrastar failed on me a month ago. Unlucky.
- sedatk 7y ago
  WD also bought out SanDisk apparently for SSD drive market.
segfaultbuserr 7y ago
> buy a competitor's drive Unfortunately... The competitor(s) you want, no longer exist! Here are some facts. * Seagate - WD's main competitor - historically didn't have a reputation of high reliability in the industry [0][1]. Its ST3000DM001 [2] drive was terrible enough to have its own Wikipedia article, which is extremely unusual for a hard drive. In terms of reputation of reliability, WD was better, and HGST (Hitachi) had the best. * Then WD brought HGST. It was kept as an independent operation for a while, since it was required by the regulators. But now it has been fully merged into WD. As parts of the deal, Toshiba received some hard drive assets from WD, thus, Seagate, WD, and Toshiba are the only three hard drive manufacturers, forming a worldwide oligopoly. Wikipedia has a great diagram showing the process of corporate consolidation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv... * Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too [3]. So what can we do? Not much. Buy Toshiba exclusively to make WD and Seagate less powerful? Maybe. But none of them is honest in the SMR affair. Nevertheless, relatively speaking, I do find that WD's denial has made the other two more honest comparatively. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8355860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8355860 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110902 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959
- wegs 7y ago
  There are quite a few other competitors. They make SSDs. It's a different price/performance curve (lower on the low-end, higher on the high-end), but as I said, reliability trumps all. In the early days, I waited to adopt SSDs because of horror stories about wear leveling algorithm bugs causing early failures (because SSD makers wanted to eek out a little bit of extra speed). Speed is nice-to-have, but fast, unreliable storage has negative value to me. On the flip side, if I now can't trust HDDs, I won't buy them. 8TB is nice-to-have, but reliability is critical. 8TB of unreliable storage has negative value to me. I mean, I was pretty productive in the days of 133MHz computers, 32MB of RAM, and 1.6GB disk space. I prefer gigahertz of multicore performance, 32GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space, but it's not worth sacrificing reliability for. A computer failure can cost me a week of time. If it all worked, I'd have a 1TB SSD RAID and an 8TB HDD RAID, each with two drives so if one fails, the other goes on. That's not just me. A random computer buyer might now know better, but if you buy a computer and something breaks, whoever makes it devalues their brand. If the HDD makers collude to give untrustworthy storage, they won't have a market left. I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too.

by wegs 7y ago

StillBored 7y ago

Yah, so they have come somewhat clean about SMR, but they have a lot of other bits they have been hiding. Some of it in plain sight. "5400 RPM class" which means what exactly? And of course the whole desktop vs nas differentiation was the early return on error logic being hard coded instead of configurable by the OS/RAID. Remove a feature charge more..

glitchc 7y ago

WD bought out Hitachi's storage business in 2012, so those Ultrastars are still their own, albeit different branding.

AnonC 7y ago
Hitachi drives (not the NAS category) have been at the top of Backblaze’s annual hard drive reliability charts for several years even after the WD acquisition. So that division is still churning out drives that are better than the WD branded drives.
- Tijdreiziger 7y ago
  They're now all branded WD.
- glitchc 7y ago
  An Ultrastar failed on me a month ago. Unlucky.
sedatk 7y ago
WD also bought out SanDisk apparently for SSD drive market.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago

> buy a competitor's drive Unfortunately... The competitor(s) you want, no longer exist! Here are some facts. * Seagate - WD's main competitor - historically didn't have a reputation of high reliability in the industry [0][1]. Its ST3000DM001 [2] drive was terrible enough to have its own Wikipedia article, which is extremely unusual for a hard drive. In terms of reputation of reliability, WD was better, and HGST (Hitachi) had the best. * Then WD brought HGST. It was kept as an independent operation for a while, since it was required by the regulators. But now it has been fully merged into WD. As parts of the deal, Toshiba received some hard drive assets from WD, thus, Seagate, WD, and Toshiba are the only three hard drive manufacturers, forming a worldwide oligopoly. Wikipedia has a great diagram showing the process of corporate consolidation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv... * Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too [3]. So what can we do? Not much. Buy Toshiba exclusively to make WD and Seagate less powerful? Maybe. But none of them is honest in the SMR affair. Nevertheless, relatively speaking, I do find that WD's denial has made the other two more honest comparatively. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8355860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8355860 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110902 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959

wegs 7y ago
There are quite a few other competitors. They make SSDs. It's a different price/performance curve (lower on the low-end, higher on the high-end), but as I said, reliability trumps all. In the early days, I waited to adopt SSDs because of horror stories about wear leveling algorithm bugs causing early failures (because SSD makers wanted to eek out a little bit of extra speed). Speed is nice-to-have, but fast, unreliable storage has negative value to me. On the flip side, if I now can't trust HDDs, I won't buy them. 8TB is nice-to-have, but reliability is critical. 8TB of unreliable storage has negative value to me. I mean, I was pretty productive in the days of 133MHz computers, 32MB of RAM, and 1.6GB disk space. I prefer gigahertz of multicore performance, 32GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space, but it's not worth sacrificing reliability for. A computer failure can cost me a week of time. If it all worked, I'd have a 1TB SSD RAID and an 8TB HDD RAID, each with two drives so if one fails, the other goes on. That's not just me. A random computer buyer might now know better, but if you buy a computer and something breaks, whoever makes it devalues their brand. If the HDD makers collude to give untrustworthy storage, they won't have a market left. I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too.