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The 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 cons

The 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 ago
All the more reason to have a failure-tolerant scenario with backups!
- apotheon 17y ago
  Agreed. 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 ago
Which 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 ago
  A 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 ago
    That 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.

sho 17y ago

All the more reason to have a failure-tolerant scenario with backups!

apotheon 17y ago
Agreed. 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 ago

Which 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 ago
A 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 ago
  That 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.