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This article reminds me of Hard Disks. Talk to any "PC fan" and they'll regale you with a story of how they will never, ever use $HD_BRAND after it crashed and
by sho 17y ago
This article reminds me of Hard Disks. Talk to any "PC fan" and they'll regale you with a story of how they will never, ever use $HD_BRAND after it crashed and lost all their data. Thing is, the brand changes depending on who you talk to. And a real professional will tell you that all the brands have similar failure rates, not to put your faith in any hardware, and advise you on a RAID and backup strategy.
Same here. I know people who use rimuhosting, they seem happy enough. I use Linode personally but have no real preference. This article smacks of a one-off bad experience which could happen anywhere - and doesn't even seem that bad. It's a VPS, for christ's sake, if you don't like it get a dedi or even better a colo.
- madars 17y agoBreaking in customer's account could happen anywhere? Really?
- sho 17y agoStop using emotive language like "breaking in". They just killed a runaway process on a user account. Nothing more. I guarantee you they could not care less beyond that.
- apotheon 17y agoThe reason I don't use consumer-grade Western Digital drives has nothing to do with a specific drive failure event, and everything to do with the fact that consumer-grade drives from WD are basically factory seconds of WD's enterprise-grade drives.
- sho 17y agoAll the more reason to have a failure-tolerant scenario with backups!
- apotheon 17y agoAgreed. It's also a good reason to use different hard drives. My preference is to have the failure tolerance and backups, but not have to use it to recover from a head crash.
- Confusion 17y agoWhich is exactly the kind of story that gets perpetuated over and over again, with different $brand's substituted. It doesn't even make sense: what criterion is used to seperate 'enterprise' from 'consumer'? They can't possibly test every drive (too expensive) and if they watch production parameters and decide based on those, chances are that most consumer drives are 'enterprise' as well. I find stories like these extremely implausible.
- apotheon 17y agoA nontrivial percentage of the "consumer" grade drives (basically, the stuff you can get at Best Buy) were actually manufactured as higher-capacity drives for the premium line (I forget the model line term WD uses at the moment) but had bad sectors coming off the line. They marked off those sectors, rounded down, low-level formatted so it only reported the "new" size, and sold them as lower capacity drives for retail consumer sales. Is that a more helpfully precise explanation?
- Confusion 17y agoThat explanation still leaves some questions open, like: is there a reason to suppose that a drive with 'bad sectors coming off the line' actually has a higher expected failure rate? Or is it actually more like what happens with CPU's, where a batch may 'fail', but will still yield CPU that can be sold as 'lower' CPU's than the batch was originally supposed to deliver. Marking something 'enterprise' grade is often a placebo and has more to do with service, contracts and well-marketed expectations than with actual differences in the goods involved.
- apotheon 17y ago> is there a reason to suppose that a drive with 'bad sectors coming off the line' actually has a higher expected failure rate? If it doesn't hurt me to choose a different brand or a different model line, the more relevant question becomes "Is there sufficient reason to believe that a drive with 'bad sectors coming off the line' doesn't have a higher actual failure rate?" It's better to be safe than sorry, as they say, and my experience is that once a drive starts degrading, it keeps degrading. The reason CPUs can often be sold at a lower capacity than originally intended without worrying about an increased likelihood of later failure is because transistors are discrete devices; if half of them fail, as long as the rest can still be accessed, you just have a CPU with the same architecture and half the transistors. On a hard drive, however, permanently hosed sectors represent actual problems on part of a single discrete device -- the hard drive platter -- and it's entirely possible that the rest of the device may be affected by this. Magnetic areas on a platter are quite so distinctly segregated as transistors on a chip. > Marking something 'enterprise' grade is often a placebo and has more to do with service, contracts and well-marketed expectations than with actual differences in the goods involved. True -- but when you explicitly use drives that have failed the quality control required for "enterprise" drives as your retail consumer grade drives, that kinda changes the landscape a bit.
- philwelch 17y agoShit, I hear the same stories about shipping companies. And cell phone companies. I now know never to use FedEx, UPS, or DHL.
- sho 17y agoYou got it. Also, never visit America, Mexico, Canada, Britain, or any other country on earth.
- apotheon 17y agoActually . . . you shouldn't visit the US. I'm leery of leaving the US because of the body cavity searches I can expect when I come back.
- mahmud 17y agoI left the U.S. for 2 years, visited shady places, had extra pages added to my passport after clocking 80 stamps on it to 22 countries. Was anxious to be harassed by the fat, ex-soldier redneck at the immigration desk. He took my passport, scanned it, and told me "welcome back home, son".
- apotheon 17y agoCongratulations. You had a good experience.