AnInkle writes "Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda has been available for a couple months from multiple retailers. But shortly after release, reports of random freezes appeared on several sites. The hang apparently occurs in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Vista when streaming video or transferring files at low speeds. After a couple of weeks of silence, Seagate has finally officially acknowledged the problem. In a response to The Tech Report, they say they're investigating the 'issue' affecting 'a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives.' Acknowledging the 'inconvenience' is a start, but most users expect at least average performance and prompt service from the capacity king of data storage." In a related story, reader Lucas123 plugs a ComputerWorld piece examining the question of Seagate's plans to stay relevant at a time when SSDs increasingly capture OEM mindshare.
I've been looking to buy a large second drive for my Mac and ALMOST hit the buy button on this drive a week ago. However, I noticed some 1-star comments on Amazon's reviews of the drive and have been watching this ever since.
The problem appears to manifest itself in lockups for 30 seconds or so at a time which kills music streaming, video streaming, etc. The only reports of success appear to be from people who are using it for an archive disk and thats it. Some people claim the problem can be avoided somewhat by disabling the write cache, but naturally you get a serious performance hit from that (especially since the memory cache is 32MB!)
Reading the forums, it appears that Seagate has not only thus told people that the drives aren't meant for a RAID environment, but even gone so far as to tell people that RAID doesn't stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but rather "Independent Drives". Hmm. Seems that time has changed this definition (FOLDOC and Wikipedia seem to claim the change in name as well).
I'm rather disappointed since now that I have a taste for a 1.5TB drive, I'm not looking to buy "just" a 1TB. Hopefully one of these companies can resolve this.
On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?
On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?
This link [wikipedia.org] might be of use to you in that regard.
thats why i buy only from seagates sv35 line of hard drives optimized for video streams. and they arent more expensive than the regulars and come with larger warranties and 1tb capacities.
No matter whether a hard drive is made for "streaming" or not, it's ridiculous that it freezes doing it. No other hard drive does so, and I own some SeaGate ones.
I stopped buying Segate a few months ago when I bought a set to upgrade my G5 editor. I purchased 5 750gig drives and 2 of the 5 were defective. They are getting as bad as the IBM deathstars were back in the late 90's/ early 00's. I have had to do data recovery on many drives this past year and over 1/2 were seagates.. Seagate used to be the drives that NEVER failed. and now they are sending low grade refurbs for any warranty replacements and the warranty replaced drives have only 90 days on them so that nice 5 year warranty turns into a 90 day warranty when the drive dies and is replaced.
I only do HD video editing so I can get away with tiny 750 gig drives, but I dont like having them fail on me like segates have been lately.
As for the SSD drive remarks.. I cant see SSD drives getting near the capacities and speed I need for HD video editing within the nest 3 years.
"I stopped buying Segate a few months ago when I bought a set to upgrade my G5 editor. I purchased 5 750gig drives and 2 of the 5 were defective. They are getting as bad as the IBM deathstars were back in the late 90's/ early 00's"
Your sample is not representative... "I had x and y fail on me, therefore the maker of x and y is crap". I used to buy western digital, and over %50 of the drives failed before 3 years. Seagate backs their drives with 5 year warranties compared to everyone else, if anything I think that's a statement of confidence in their ability to create drives that outlast the competition. All hard disks are destined to fail at some point due to moving parts and after prolonged use, even flash drives have a limited lifetime (even if it will never see failure during the time it is used). This is just the nature of the beast.
The biggest improvement's in hard disk life in my experience has been in adding active cooling to the disks themselves. Ever since I've added active cooling, I've noticed a mark decrease in failure before the 3 year mark, and I tend to go through a lot of hard disks.
comments on newegg or any self-selected forum are also meaningless as a much higher percentage of people with problems will comment, than those without problems.
Just check the reviews of these drives - indeed, most 1TB drives as well as the Seagate 1.5TB drives - on Newegg or TigerDirect. These drives die regularly - they have an astronomical rate of failure, regardless of what the manufacturers claim. Some are DOA from the store (some people blame this on the OEM packaging - but the reviews vary from drive company to drive company, suggesting the packaging is not the culprit.) Of course, I know that negative reviews on such sites tend to outweigh positive reviews
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday November 11 2008, @06:13PM (#25727337)
Patterson, David; Gibson, Garth A.; Katz, Randy (1988). "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)" (PDF). SIGMOD Conference: pp 109â"116.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday November 11 2008, @07:27PM (#25728051)
Inexpensive has no meaning in RAIDs of today, if it ever did.
I can't believe that even after being shown incontrovertible proof by the guys who created the acronym and described in detail how the first 5 levels work, we still have some dipshit here saying "if it ever did".
For whatever reasons the otherwise smart chaps who devised RAID decided to use that word, at no stage was it a characteristic of RAIDsets that they were made of inexpensive disks.
The term "inexpensive" in the RAID acronym is used to mean relative to the cost of a single disk with equal performance. It doesn't mean cheap it means cheaper.
I actually talked with Randy Katz about RAID, as I was in one of his classes at Berkeley. As late as last May, it still meant "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks".
I think it shouldn't matter the definition, either way Seagate has no excuse. That out of the way..
But the whole theory of RAID doesn't dictate anything about price nor, in my opinion, even require them to be 'disks'. Maybe 'inexpensive disks' is the term coined by the originator, but I think the originator should recognize the more general applicability of the concept.
For ultimate wrongness with respect to the declared meaning, how about a RAID-0 of high-capacity SSDs. A non-redundant array of expensive non-disk things.
... RAID doesn't stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but rather "Independent Drives".
The name hasn't changed. RAID has never had anything to do with the price of the disks. You've always been able to make a RAID set out of expensive disks, and the biggest RAID packages usually are made up of expensive disks.
Yes, you could, but then you'd be missing the point. MAny did miss the point, in fact.
Independent Disks is a sort of marketing revisionism because they were tired of customers pointing out that "this isn't really inexpensive, is it?".
I've never had too many problems with seagate, and consider them to be a great brand. I also like western digital, but when I have a choice, I go seagate for the 5 year warranty.
As for SSD drives, I'm not exactly sure what everybody's worried about here. I don't see any affordable SSD drives, let alone any in the 1TB range.
I've never had too many problems with seagate, and consider them to be a great brand. I also like western digital, but when I have a choice, I go seagate for the 5 year warranty.
I've always disciplined myself with the thought, "It's not a matter of if a drive is going to fail, but when...". But oddly enough I have had tremendous success with long term hard disc usage. In fact Maxtor is the only brand that's failed thus far. 7 years of usage was pretty good tho!
Guess you never bought any of IBM's Deskstar disaster series. I have a drawer full of these, none made it past 3 years. The drives were so bad, IBM sold the division, to Hitachi I think.
How many were made in Hungary? I'm betting very few to none. We had a huge lot of 20 gig drives die on us, all from Singapore (or something?) but none of the Hungarian ones died. To me this means it was not a design issue, but rather a quality in production issue. -nB
I keep reading about people going Seagate over Western Digital "for the 5 year warranty".
If you think that WD doesn't offer a 5 year warranty on any drives you are wrong. If you think there is only "the" 5 year warranty instead of "those" 5 year warranties then maybe I'm going to be a grammar nazi too.
People are so quick to look to the top end but there is a reliability/speed/power/noise benefit to buying the sweet spot drive. Cost is in the eye of the beholder as the 640GB drive is lower in purchase price but won't be the best price per GB. Myself I'm willing to use the smaller drives, but then I'm the type that can still make out on a 250GB drive without being low on disk space.
As a single drive or in an array as long as you don't run out of space you gain performance using smaller drives so long as you buy carefully. In RAID more spindles equal more speed. As a single drive you can pick and choose the highest density platters (320/333/334 as the desired platters currently vs the 250GB platters that are still floating around the supply chain in so many drives)
Sony Vaio Laptop. Someone in my company almost bought one. Thankfully they came to me for advice before sinking money on their "new" personal machine.
I pointed out the following: the SSD drive was a mere 32 GB.
A standard installation (infection?) of Windows Vista (and no XP-downgrade option, Sony won't give you the drivers) eats up a good 12 of that. Office 2007 (yeah yeah I know, I work with what they use), another 6 easily. Miscellaneous preloads, drivers, "service" software, and of course the (ugh) "rest
I call shenanigans on this. I'm running on a 32Gb SSD using XP pro with all the trimmings, VS2005 SP1 (With full MSDN install), Office 2007, VMWare, Firefox, Chrome, Picasa, GIMP, Photoshop CS3, and Cygwin (just to name the largest programs). I've still got 12GB of free space.
Throw in some external storage in the form of a USB drive and I've got a system that boots in ~10 seconds, restarts in ~15, and cut my compile time by a factor of 10.
Not to mention all the apps open a lot more quickly. I don't kno
I have no idea - wake me up when an affordable SSD can hold 1TB or so. Until then I'll stick to spinning magnetic media everywhere but maybe my laptop.
Database admins are also showing interest. SSDs may well become the standard but when a 1 TB drive is only $100 it really is hard to look longingly at an SSD.
Where are SSDs "capturing mindshare" anywhere other than the portable market?
Anyone who cares about the performance of the parts in their computers has been thinking of SSDs for some time now, and in a positive light. The same "mindshare" that WD Raptor's [wikipedia.org] built will eventually turnover to one SSD or another.
Given that the effective useful life for flash memory in thumbdrives seems to vary between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles, what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS? Any computing that hits the swap space heavily is going to be thrashing the lifespan of the drive. SSDs can be faster and have lower power consumption, but if you have to replace them more often, they're going to have to be cheaper th
There are two different technologies for SSDs, single and multicell. The former is used in the $600 for 32 GB enterprise drives, the later in the $100 for 128 GB cheapos. The MC drives are the ones with the low write cycles. But if you use your SSD in a fast read-little write application like a database server it lasts forever and you can take advantage of the blazing read spead (most write performance I've seen isn't much ahead of a good HD array).
Give it time, SSDs were nowhere on the consumer market before the last year.
Also, I notice hard drive capacity just isn't increasing at the rate it used to (early 2000s). I think last year the biggest was 1TB already and now it's just hovering at 1.5TB. OTOH, for about $49 two years ago got you a 1GB usb drive at walmart (micro cruzer). Same brand 8GB/16GB costs $25/$59 respectively. Can get a generic 32GB online. Not a bad rate of increase.
I suspect once capacity gets within 2/3 of harddrive space, yo
Put it as my secondary Hard drive. Unless that is your only drive, I would tend to not put such a big hard drive as my main. Then the entire OS wouldn't slow down at once.
The comments on that page are pretty harsh. I've never had a problem with Seagate and would still put it with WD as my favorites, but I am curious as to what is causing this, more cache needed?
HDD manufacturers will always face a large amount of negative press. The reason is simple. If your DVD drive breaks...ho-hum I'm out $XX and need a new one. Guess I'm not watching Kung Fu Panda tonight. If your HDD breaks...OMFG!!!I had 5 years of tax returns, 20000 hours of music, 1000s of irreplaceable pictures!...and I'm out $XX!!!
Simply put, the cost of failure for a storage manufacturer is an order of magnitude above the rest of the industry. People don't just lose money, they lose memories, they lose costly business information. Of course you and I know that we should back up our data. But its hindsight talking, because we've probably lost data before too.
The real problem with these drives, or the scary problem, is the folks using these in RAID arrays, or things like the Drobo. The drive freaks out, so the array marks it bad. You pop the drive out and put in a new one, or even the same one again, to start a rebuild. But another drive freaks out during that process, array says "oh crap, another bad drive!" and your data goes to/dev/null. Even though no data was ever actually lost... just bad drives.
Thats with RAID 5, RAID 6 can reduce the possibility of data loss even further and if your data is critical then RAID 10 would be *extremely* to fail completely.
The 1.5TB drive is part of a family of Seagate drives, the 7200.11 drives. Supposedly the only differences between the different drives in the family are the number of platters and the size of the cache. So if there's a bug, I would expect the same issue with the smaller 7200.11 drives. (If not, the the root cause is probably related to the increase in power draw from spinning the fourth platter.)
I just got some of the 7200.11 1TB seagate drives about a month ago - one I use with an eSata case to hold an Aperture (photo editing) library, the other I use as a drive to store and replay HDTV streams captured OTA from an elGato receiver in a Firewire case. I have yet to see any lockups or freezes like those described, and I'm using them in ways that would seem to be worst case.
On a lot of 60, a random subsample of 10:
- 7 have been nothing but blissful
- 2 throw random errors enough to stall a raid array
- 1 just hangs the controller after some amount of time.
Not saying the percentages bear out over the long haul, but people saying "WFM" are probably telling the truth, as are those complaining of errors.
"Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware."
"We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions."
"Affected part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18."
The official statement is slightly misleading...
1) When the problem occurs all hard drive operations stop until the OS times out the ATA command - typically 30 seconds. This results in the computer freezing for 30 seconds.
2) The problem can result in data loss if using a RAID system. Depending on the OS/RAID configuration the problem may cause a RAID system to think the drive has died. The RAID system automatically removes the drive and continues to run degraded (as designed). 20 minutes later when another drive exhibits the problem the RAID system drops the second drive and dies.
3) The problem may be a systematic problem rather than a small number of drives - all drives have I tested running the SD17 firmware have exhibited the problem.
They go to newegg. They go the the hard drives section. They pick narrow it down to SATA II. They sort by lowest price. They middle-click a few Seagates that are around their capacity requirement. They double check the 5 year warranty. They make sure any bad reviews are from idiots who don't know what they're doing. They pick one based on cost and capacity.
OEMs like SSDs because of the margins they can get, sure. But until DELL stops selling HDDs, Seagate and Western Digital and Hitachi have nothing to worry about in that department.
You're correct, they are intriguing for portable devices, but at this point they're still way too expensive for most people. I'm fine with a disc which is only 120gb or so as long as it's reliable, but I don't think that SSDs are at a reasonable price point.
As for desktops and servers, they need to be a lot less expensive before they're going to be going in any of my computers. For the most part I'm happy with my ZFS mirrored disks. And they're both ATA133.
I'd be willing to wager that half of all computer users don't even know what SSD stands for.
I don't have access to the proper statistics, but I'd be willing to bet that a substantial number of people walking into Best Buy wouldn't be able to tell you what HDD stands for. That said, I agree that it'll be a while before SSDs really take the crown away from plain old HDDs. They're simply too expensive per GB for most uses.
I almost lost my coffee on that "mindshare" bit. Apple is pretty much at the forefront of yuppy technology "mindshare," and the SSD isn't standard - even on the Macbook Air. Not much of a chance the unwashed masses are looking at SSD any time soon, unless they're buying a workstation laptop replacement.
The tech is not at all price per gig competitive, and only Intel has an SSD that outperforms traditional hard drives on speed and battery life by any significant margin.
Bugs in hard drive firmware are completely unexpected. We aren't talking about a nVidia driver here. Hard drives are expected to perform flawlessly when new.
Half baked (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem appears to manifest itself in lockups for 30 seconds or so at a time which kills music streaming, video streaming, etc. The only reports of success appear to be from people who are using it for an archive disk and thats it. Some people claim the problem can be avoided somewhat by disabling the write cache, but naturally you get a serious performance hit from that (especially since the memory cache is 32MB!)
Reading the forums, it appears that Seagate has not only thus told people that the drives aren't meant for a RAID environment, but even gone so far as to tell people that RAID doesn't stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but rather "Independent Drives". Hmm. Seems that time has changed this definition (FOLDOC and Wikipedia seem to claim the change in name as well).
I'm rather disappointed since now that I have a taste for a 1.5TB drive, I'm not looking to buy "just" a 1TB. Hopefully one of these companies can resolve this.
On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?
This link [wikipedia.org] might be of use to you in that regard.
Echoes of Intel... [tomshardware.com]
Parent
Re: SV35.3 (Score:2, Interesting)
thats why i buy only from seagates sv35 line of hard drives optimized for video streams.
and they arent more expensive than the regulars and come with larger warranties and 1tb capacities.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
I stopped buying Segate a few months ago when I bought a set to upgrade my G5 editor. I purchased 5 750gig drives and 2 of the 5 were defective. They are getting as bad as the IBM deathstars were back in the late 90's/ early 00's. I have had to do data recovery on many drives this past year and over 1/2 were seagates.. Seagate used to be the drives that NEVER failed. and now they are sending low grade refurbs for any warranty replacements and the warranty replaced drives have only 90 days on them so that nice 5 year warranty turns into a 90 day warranty when the drive dies and is replaced.
I only do HD video editing so I can get away with tiny 750 gig drives, but I dont like having them fail on me like segates have been lately.
As for the SSD drive remarks.. I cant see SSD drives getting near the capacities and speed I need for HD video editing within the nest 3 years.
Parent
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
"I stopped buying Segate a few months ago when I bought a set to upgrade my G5 editor. I purchased 5 750gig drives and 2 of the 5 were defective. They are getting as bad as the IBM deathstars were back in the late 90's/ early 00's"
Your sample is not representative ... "I had x and y fail on me, therefore the maker of x and y is crap". I used to buy western digital, and over %50 of the drives failed before 3 years. Seagate backs their drives with 5 year warranties compared to everyone else, if anything I think that's a statement of confidence in their ability to create drives that outlast the competition. All hard disks are destined to fail at some point due to moving parts and after prolonged use, even flash drives have a limited lifetime (even if it will never see failure during the time it is used). This is just the nature of the beast.
The biggest improvement's in hard disk life in my experience has been in adding active cooling to the disks themselves. Ever since I've added active cooling, I've noticed a mark decrease in failure before the 3 year mark, and I tend to go through a lot of hard disks.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
comments on newegg or any self-selected forum are also meaningless as a much higher percentage of people with problems will comment, than those without problems.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The problem appears to manifest itself in lockups for 30 seconds or so at a time which kills music streaming, video streaming, etc.
Maybe they got their firmware from Comcast...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Just check the reviews of these drives - indeed, most 1TB drives as well as the Seagate 1.5TB drives - on Newegg or TigerDirect. These drives die regularly - they have an astronomical rate of failure, regardless of what the manufacturers claim. Some are DOA from the store (some people blame this on the OEM packaging - but the reviews vary from drive company to drive company, suggesting the packaging is not the culprit.) Of course, I know that negative reviews on such sites tend to outweigh positive reviews
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
Patterson, David; Gibson, Garth A.; Katz, Randy (1988). "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)" (PDF). SIGMOD Conference: pp 109â"116.
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/CSD-87-391.pdf
right....
Parent
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Funny)
I can't believe that even after being shown incontrovertible proof by the guys who created the acronym and described in detail how the first 5 levels work, we still have some dipshit here saying "if it ever did".
Parent
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
For whatever reasons the otherwise smart chaps who devised RAID decided to use that word, at no stage was it a characteristic of RAIDsets that they were made of inexpensive disks.
The term "inexpensive" in the RAID acronym is used to mean relative to the cost of a single disk with equal performance. It doesn't mean cheap it means cheaper.
Parent
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Funny)
Regardless of whether the disks are inexpensive or not, wouldn't you agree that an array of disks are going to be independent no matter what?
Redundant Array of Codependent Disks?
Parent
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
I actually talked with Randy Katz about RAID, as I was in one of his classes at Berkeley. As late as last May, it still meant "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks".
Sorry to burst your bubble.
Parent
Though.. (Score:5, Funny)
I think it shouldn't matter the definition, either way Seagate has no excuse. That out of the way..
But the whole theory of RAID doesn't dictate anything about price nor, in my opinion, even require them to be 'disks'. Maybe 'inexpensive disks' is the term coined by the originator, but I think the originator should recognize the more general applicability of the concept.
For ultimate wrongness with respect to the declared meaning, how about a RAID-0 of high-capacity SSDs. A non-redundant array of expensive non-disk things.
Parent
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Insightful)
The name hasn't changed. RAID has never had anything to do with the price of the disks. You've always been able to make a RAID set out of expensive disks, and the biggest RAID packages usually are made up of expensive disks.
Yes, you could, but then you'd be missing the point. MAny did miss the point, in fact.
Independent Disks is a sort of marketing revisionism because they were tired of customers pointing out that "this isn't really inexpensive, is it?".
Parent
Seagate is good (Score:4, Insightful)
As for SSD drives, I'm not exactly sure what everybody's worried about here. I don't see any affordable SSD drives, let alone any in the 1TB range.
Re: (Score:2)
I've never had too many problems with seagate, and consider them to be a great brand. I also like western digital, but when I have a choice, I go seagate for the 5 year warranty.
I've always disciplined myself with the thought, "It's not a matter of if a drive is going to fail, but when...". But oddly enough I have had tremendous success with long term hard disc usage. In fact Maxtor is the only brand that's failed thus far. 7 years of usage was pretty good tho!
Re:Seagate is good (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How many were made in Hungary? I'm betting very few to none. We had a huge lot of 20 gig drives die on us, all from Singapore (or something?) but none of the Hungarian ones died. To me this means it was not a design issue, but rather a quality in production issue.
-nB
Re:Seagate is good (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep reading about people going Seagate over Western Digital "for the 5 year warranty".
If you think that WD doesn't offer a 5 year warranty on any drives you are wrong. If you think there is only "the" 5 year warranty instead of "those" 5 year warranties then maybe I'm going to be a grammar nazi too.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=488 [wdc.com] will get you started on 5 year warranty drives from WD.
WD1001FALS = 1TB
WD7501AALS = 750GB
WD6401AALS = 640GB (I'd recommend this drive)
WD5001AALS = 500GB
People are so quick to look to the top end but there is a reliability/speed/power/noise benefit to buying the sweet spot drive. Cost is in the eye of the beholder as the 640GB drive is lower in purchase price but won't be the best price per GB. Myself I'm willing to use the smaller drives, but then I'm the type that can still make out on a 250GB drive without being low on disk space.
As a single drive or in an array as long as you don't run out of space you gain performance using smaller drives so long as you buy carefully. In RAID more spindles equal more speed. As a single drive you can pick and choose the highest density platters (320/333/334 as the desired platters currently vs the 250GB platters that are still floating around the supply chain in so many drives)
Parent
Stupid thought of the day (Score:2, Informative)
Sony Vaio Laptop. Someone in my company almost bought one. Thankfully they came to me for advice before sinking money on their "new" personal machine.
I pointed out the following: the SSD drive was a mere 32 GB.
A standard installation (infection?) of Windows Vista (and no XP-downgrade option, Sony won't give you the drivers) eats up a good 12 of that. Office 2007 (yeah yeah I know, I work with what they use), another 6 easily. Miscellaneous preloads, drivers, "service" software, and of course the (ugh) "rest
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Throw in some external storage in the form of a USB drive and I've got a system that boots in ~10 seconds, restarts in ~15, and cut my compile time by a factor of 10.
Not to mention all the apps open a lot more quickly. I don't kno
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Capturing Mindshare... (Score:4, Interesting)
Where are SSDs "capturing mindshare" anywhere other than the portable market?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no idea - wake me up when an affordable SSD can hold 1TB or so. Until then I'll stick to spinning magnetic media everywhere but maybe my laptop.
Re: (Score:2)
Database admins are also showing interest.
SSDs may well become the standard but when a 1 TB drive is only $100 it really is hard to look longingly at an SSD.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd worry about a SSD being destroyed too quickly with certain database loads.
If its mostly read then yeah the SSD would kick butt but throw in frequent writing and I'd get worried.
Re: (Score:2)
We've done database servers with SSD and RAID1+0. Amazingly fast, and the power savings aren't bad either.
Re: (Score:2)
Where are SSDs "capturing mindshare" anywhere other than the portable market?
Anyone who cares about the performance of the parts in their computers has been thinking of SSDs for some time now, and in a positive light. The same "mindshare" that WD Raptor's [wikipedia.org] built will eventually turnover to one SSD or another.
Re:Lifespan... (Score:2)
Given that the effective useful life for flash memory in thumbdrives seems to vary between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles, what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS? Any computing that hits the swap space heavily is going to be thrashing the lifespan of the drive. SSDs can be faster and have lower power consumption, but if you have to replace them more often, they're going to have to be cheaper th
Re:Lifespan... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Give it time, SSDs were nowhere on the consumer market before the last year.
Also, I notice hard drive capacity just isn't increasing at the rate it used to (early 2000s). I think last year the biggest was 1TB already and now it's just hovering at 1.5TB. OTOH, for about $49 two years ago got you a 1GB usb drive at walmart (micro cruzer). Same brand 8GB/16GB costs $25/$59 respectively. Can get a generic 32GB online. Not a bad rate of increase.
I suspect once capacity gets within 2/3 of harddrive space, yo
What I would do... (Score:2, Insightful)
The comments on that page are pretty harsh. I've never had a problem with Seagate and would still put it with WD as my favorites, but I am curious as to what is causing this, more cache needed?
Re: (Score:2)
Possibly buggy firmware. Its only when reading files slowly so it must fill the read buffer and then forget to refill it when it gets empty?
My theory anyway from the limited information.
Harsh Comments (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply put, the cost of failure for a storage manufacturer is an order of magnitude above the rest of the industry. People don't just lose money, they lose memories, they lose costly business information. Of course you and I know that we should back up our data. But its hindsight talking, because we've probably lost data before too.
Parent
The real problem with these (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problem with these drives, or the scary problem, is the folks using these in RAID arrays, or things like the Drobo. The drive freaks out, so the array marks it bad. You pop the drive out and put in a new one, or even the same one again, to start a rebuild. But another drive freaks out during that process, array says "oh crap, another bad drive!" and your data goes to /dev/null. Even though no data was ever actually lost... just bad drives.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Thats with RAID 5, RAID 6 can reduce the possibility of data loss even further and if your data is critical then RAID 10 would be *extremely* to fail completely.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If the rebuild time exceeds the average time of the problem behavior it doesn't matter what RAID level you use or how many drives are involved.
With Terabytes of data RAID 5 and RAID 6 will take way too long to rebuild and your array will fail during rebuild.
Even with RAID 10, if the behavior occurs in less time than synching the mirror takes you are screwed.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I prefer to calculate biting satire...
Other Seagate 7200.11 drives? (Score:4, Insightful)
The 1.5TB drive is part of a family of Seagate drives, the 7200.11 drives. Supposedly the only differences between the different drives in the family are the number of platters and the size of the cache. So if there's a bug, I would expect the same issue with the smaller 7200.11 drives. (If not, the the root cause is probably related to the increase in power draw from spinning the fourth platter.)
Do not think so (Score:2)
I just got some of the 7200.11 1TB seagate drives about a month ago - one I use with an eSata case to hold an Aperture (photo editing) library, the other I use as a drive to store and replay HDTV streams captured OTA from an elGato receiver in a Firewire case. I have yet to see any lockups or freezes like those described, and I'm using them in ways that would seem to be worst case.
So, I'd go ahead with the purchase.
On a large lot.. (Score:3, Informative)
On a lot of 60, a random subsample of 10:
- 7 have been nothing but blissful
- 2 throw random errors enough to stall a raid array
- 1 just hangs the controller after some amount of time.
Not saying the percentages bear out over the long haul, but people saying "WFM" are probably telling the truth, as are those complaining of errors.
The official statement is slightly misleading... (Score:3, Insightful)
"We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions."
"Affected part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18."
The official statement is slightly misleading...
1) When the problem occurs all hard drive operations stop until the OS times out the ATA command - typically 30 seconds. This results in the computer freezing for 30 seconds.
2) The problem can result in data loss if using a RAID system. Depending on the OS/RAID configuration the problem may cause a RAID system to think the drive has died. The RAID system automatically removes the drive and continues to run degraded (as designed). 20 minutes later when another drive exhibits the problem the RAID system drops the second drive and dies.
3) The problem may be a systematic problem rather than a small number of drives - all drives have I tested running the SD17 firmware have exhibited the problem.
SSDs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's what nerds do:
They go to newegg.
They go the the hard drives section.
They pick narrow it down to SATA II.
They sort by lowest price.
They middle-click a few Seagates that are around their capacity requirement.
They double check the 5 year warranty.
They make sure any bad reviews are from idiots who don't know what they're doing.
They pick one based on cost and capacity.
OEMs like SSDs because of the margins they can get, sure. But until DELL stops selling HDDs, Seagate and Western Digital and Hitachi have nothing to worry about in that department.
Besides, it's not as if Seagate is skipping SSDs.
Re: (Score:2)
You're correct, they are intriguing for portable devices, but at this point they're still way too expensive for most people. I'm fine with a disc which is only 120gb or so as long as it's reliable, but I don't think that SSDs are at a reasonable price point.
As for desktops and servers, they need to be a lot less expensive before they're going to be going in any of my computers. For the most part I'm happy with my ZFS mirrored disks. And they're both ATA133.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd be willing to wager that half of all computer users don't even know what SSD stands for.
I don't have access to the proper statistics, but I'd be willing to bet that a substantial number of people walking into Best Buy wouldn't be able to tell you what HDD stands for.
That said, I agree that it'll be a while before SSDs really take the crown away from plain old HDDs. They're simply too expensive per GB for most uses.
Yep (Score:2)
I almost lost my coffee on that "mindshare" bit. Apple is pretty much at the forefront of yuppy technology "mindshare," and the SSD isn't standard - even on the Macbook Air. Not much of a chance the unwashed masses are looking at SSD any time soon, unless they're buying a workstation laptop replacement.
The tech is not at all price per gig competitive, and only Intel has an SSD that outperforms traditional hard drives on speed and battery life by any significant margin.
The coolest thing SSD could provide is
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
CIte your authority. NTFS is partially journaled as well.
I smell a rat.
FS like ext3 can be partitioned in any number of usable ways for streams; a 1.5TB drive isn't that large.
And it wasn't that long ago that NTFS couldn't be used on a volume larger than 4GB.... then 32GB.
And additionally, take your 235 Microsoft patents violated and cite them, too.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bugs in hard drive firmware are completely unexpected. We aren't talking about a nVidia driver here. Hard drives are expected to perform flawlessly when new.