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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 t

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.

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.