A Look Under Western Digital's Hood 131
Tom's Hardware got a rare opportunity to explore the Western Digital campus and show us what goes on under the hood of one of the favorites in storage tech. "When you buy a car, you look under the hood. Given the critical importance of hard disk storage in all of our lives, we thought you might want a peek under that hood, too. Now that Western Digital is in the business of breaking new capacity records (the latest Caviar Green was the first drive to hit 2TB, for example), we jumped at the chance to take a first-ever, unrestricted tour of its California R&D facilities. This is the place where magnetic technology of the 1950s meets the nano- and quantum-level technologies of the current decade."
Hmm (Score:1, Interesting)
Given the critical importance of hard disk storage in all of our lives
Much like cars, once you've been burned once... it's hard to place trust in a company. For example, I purchased two IBM deathstar (actually called deskstar, but nicked as such because of their high failure rate) hard drives. Both failed within 5 months. I'd avoid an ibm item like the plague, even out of simple paranoia.
In the same regard, I had a WD hard drive, 40GB, fail on me. That was about 8 years ago. I haven't looked back. Anyone have any first hand experience with WD's reliability as of late? I know
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
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Ease of RMA and warranty honoring is huge. It's impossible to ship perfection every time. Yet that's just about what is necessary in the world of data storage. I'm a reasonable guy and I expect the same from companies I do business with.
It only took one bad experience with Seagate and I'll not be back. Wasn't that the drive failed out of the box (shit happens). It was the simple fact that their RMA process was stupid. At one point I even had some brain dead idiot tell me that Linux wasn't supported an
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Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Western Digital does one better - they will cross-ship a new drive if you need for only the cost of your return shipping to them. It's really handy when you have a drive kick up a pre-fail SMART error. You can get a new drive on the way before the old one fails and just do the swap out in the array. I've had to do it twice (out of 16 drives) for my home storage array over the years.
anecdote deconstructed (Score:5, Interesting)
I see your Seagate anecdote with one of my own.
I had a Seagate 500GB 7200.10 fail in September 2008 (crappy firmware edition), not long after installation after having sat on a shelf for a few months. When I approached Seagate to RMA the drive, they barely bothered to ask me what was wrong with it. Filled out a form, slapped it into a box, and back came the replacement, though a little less promptly than 3-7 days on the RMA form.
I'm at the point in life where I generally install a new OS onto a new disk drive, re-using older drives after *months* of successful operation on the new system / configuration. Spindles are cheap insurance at modern prices.
No vendor is immune from production glitches. I've been searching for the fountain of electronic youth for twenty years. No company, however great, is immune from a Toyota moment.
It amuses me how talismanic we tend to become on low sample sizes. Typical example: "I had a Brand X drive fail on me back in 2000, and haven't purchased another one since." Every vendor I've ever tried has fallen on its platter at least once, so I'm now back to pencil and paper.
What would make me happy is more binning from the drive manufacturer's. I like the middle bin between Joe consumer and Enterprise exabucks. It can't be that hard to look at production data and say "this batch is better than that batch" and bin accordingly.
I've heard that the external backup drives sold at Costco and places like that *are* sourced from batches not up to full warranty treatment. You'll notice these appliances have a shorter drive-life warranty than the same drive sold naked.
OTOH, it's hard for the average consumer to know for certain if you pay a $50 premium for the extra quality bin whether you're getting more quality, or just a different sticker. A web hosting facility is going to have the failure data to back up any decision making on paying a premium price.
Also, it's pretty easy for a careless consumer to compromise drive life by poor handling, installation, or faulty cooling. I'd guess about half of all failed drives (excepting DeathStar production sagas) suffered abuse at the hands of the retail chain or end user, which sets the limit on how much quality it makes sense for the vendors to promise.
However, if the consumer is playing a $50 sticker premium for a "black edition" disk drive, it's also likely the abuse level and cooling components are more carefully considers.
That would be a funny business model. The drive vendor sells exactly the same drives for $50 more, but the buyers who spring for the premium take so much better care of the drives, the drives gain a reputation for delivering higher reliability justifying the price.
To make this work, the vendor has to keep the supply of "black edition" drives to a relatively small trickle. Once the masses get their hands on them, the game is ruined.
One point the article doesn't mention is analyzing the platters under static load instead of dynamic load (including strain from spinning) and spindle vibration. I wonder how much that complicates quality control.
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I don't expect them to be. I do expect them not to treat me like shit when I find do a production glitch. The hardware is defective out of the box they need to fix it. It is that simple.
It is NOT about shipping a defective product. It's about not honoring the warranty which I paid extra for. If a company can't stand behind their warranty then it doesn't deserve your business.
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Agreed. Twice I went through RMA hell with Seagate and won't be back anytime soon. Both had really odd problems too, for example one would work fine in PIO mode but not at all in DMA/UDMA mode. WTF? At least other brands fail in straight forward ways (clicking, noisy, bad sectors etc).
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Defective cache RAM on the drive's circuit board, perhaps?
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Concurred. All 3 of my MyBooks died within 3 months of unwrapping.
The internal WD drives themselves though -> reliable.
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In my experience (anecdotal, but so is yours), WDs have been the most reliable, with Maxtor being the least, non-scsi segment. For home computers, I've had a dozen WDs between myself and my family, most have lasted 3-4 years before being rendered useless due to being too small. One died young. I opened my sister's computer case to figure out what was wrong, and found several run-lines where soda had been spilled on the case and leaked inside, all passing over/onto the drive. I can't really blame WD for this
I don't seem to have any problem with them (Score:5, Informative)
Well, all hard drives can fail sooner or later, and there's a reason for the M in MTBF. The problem with IBM Deathstars wasn't just that they failed (all do), but that their failure rate was disproportionately higher than any other brand at the time. And yeah, I had one of those fail on me too.
That said, I don't seem to have much of a problem with failing WD drives. I have a Raptor of each of the 75 GB, 150 GB and 300 GB varieties, all of them since that particular series was launched and all three still seem to chug along just fine. But that's a non-representative sample too, so don't take it as more than a personal anecdote.
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Connor drives (all the way back) also had a peculiar bug where if the drive sat unpowered for a few months, it would lose the ability to boot. (Fixable with FDisk, "set partition active" but still annoying.) I never saw a Conner HD that was entirely free of this issue, and I saw a lot of 'em back then.
And a few of these drives would also lose ALL data, if they sat idle more than about 6 months.
After Seagate bought Conner, I saw a bunch of "Seagate" drives with the same issue, tho if you looked closely, they
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I've got one old 36GB raptor and 72GB raptor.
Both are chugging along just fine. I think they're about 5 years old now?
I use my computers daily. Those raptors are hearty drives. I've had to RMA four seagates once, and two other seagates twice, in the same time period. This is just for my own PCs.
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[. . .] there's a reason for the M in MTBF.
That IBM is mean? Perhaps you meant there's a reason for the F in MTBF. Or perhaps, referring to the "Deathstar", you should have used IBMTBF?
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It was a filesystem bug, not a hardware failure. (Score:4, Informative)
The rash of 40GB HD failures (and it wasn't just W.D.) wasn't the hardware. In most cases it was because the entire 40GB was partitioned as One Big Drive... in FAT32, which was still the dominant filesystem for Windows.
The problem is that FAT32 has a bug that can cause data-wrapping if the partition is larger than 32GB. And the bug exactly mimics a failing HD -- random data loss, corrupted files.
The explanation used to be on Microsoft's tech site, but it vanished last time they nuked a bunch of older material (which they do periodically).
At any rate, you can see why there was a rash of "HD failures" when HDs exceeded 32GB. And W.D. took the brunt of this, since at the time they were the first (and for some time, the only) manufacturer offering a consumer HD larger than 32GB. By the time everyone else caught up, most of the Windows world had moved to NTFS, which does not have the bug, and the problem went away.
BTW not long after that, Seagate did a study on RMA'd drives, and found that about 60% of the time the hardware was fine, and the "failure" was in fact caused by a filesystem or software error. This is pretty much in line with my own experience.
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I've noticed that SMART sometimes shows ridiculous bogus values, that tend to indicate some sort of overflow condition in the software. Which still doesn't mean the physical part of the drive has failed.
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Anecdotally, every single manufacturer is having reliability problems; there's no one brand you can Just Count On. WD is included in that; I recently had a WD drive fail after just a few months. I wanted to know who to switch to, asked around, and there's just no answer.
The good news is that drives are big and cheap. Use software RAID1 and the worst drives combine to become very reliable storage. So that's my answer: buy the cheapest drives you can get, and use them in pairs or triplets. Even multiply
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As an aside, as a SAN administrator I feel it important to point out that regardless
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I purchased two 80GB WD Caviar drives - one about 5 years ago, the other 3 years ago. Neither one lasted more than a year.
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Dear WD, Could You Help Us End an EMF Debate? (Score:3, Interesting)
and (my personal favorite) the warning about how the strong magnet inside the system could fritz your pacemaker.
So you have a large number of workers exposed to this machine that (I presume) creates massive electromagnetic fields? And they are exposed to it for lengthy amounts of time in proximity to it? And you have other workers in the same area/facility that are not exposed to it?
...
I tire of the ongoing debate that electromagnetic fields are hazardous to your health [mercola.com]. Since you provide these people ongoing health care, perhaps you could release anonymized data [wikipedia.org] so we could either confirm or deny this? If anything it would help clear things up in -- not only the power lines debate -- but also maybe cellphones [slashdot.org] if the EMFs are in anyway similar.
Just a thought
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HIPAA, sorry.
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For it to be of medical use, the data would need to include all relevent bits of data to compare their health to others with similar health risks. For example: gender, height, weight, age, smoker, chronic health issues, etc. At that point, the data is effectively no longer anonymized, especially if linked to a single facility.
I mean, how many 5'2", 32 year old women who smoke do you think work for WD? Now, you can pinpoint their medical history, such as if they are HIV+.
This is, of course, assuming WD
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I completely agree, but because this is a small sample size, and people are definitely interested in this data, someone might be willing to compensate them financially/free medical checkups in exchange for the potential problems of their medical history being known.
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True, but then you would have potential selection bias in the data. For example, let's assume the strong magnetic fields result in increased cases of incontenance. Those with incontenance would likely ask their records be witheld, and suddenly your data set is pointless.
I agree it would make for an interesting data set, but I don't see it being very robust from a scientific standpoint.
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I understand that potential problem. And clearly they should seek to try and get everyone's data. But from my point of view: if I am having any medical problem, and someone offers to check me up, and other in my environment to try and correlate if the environment might be a factor...I would welcome it.
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Look, if it were that big of an issue, you'd see headlines about people leaving the company and suing them and settling out of court for huge sums due to health issues.
You're not going to get brain cancer from talking on your damned cellphone. If you're afraid you are, then quit using one. If you're afraid of cell towers giving you cancer, check yourself into an asylum, because if that were the case you'd see cancer rates across the country rising by tens of thousands of percent, centered on those towers.
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Well, the simple problem is, that depending on what you accept, it’s ether already 100% clear, or not at all.
If you only look at the photons, it’s 100% clear, that they are waaaayy to weak to get any electrons to do anything. At maximum you will get 0.1-0.2 degrees of temperature raise. Which is nothing compared to sunlight or a warm shower.
But the problem is, that people say that there are other effects. No idea what else they could mean, since there is not really anything else (van der Waals?)
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Sorry, a strong magnet does not an EMF field make. EMFs are about varying fields - an oscillating magnetic field produces an (also oscillating) electric field, and viceversa.
On top of that, the frequency of said oscillation not only determines the depth to which it penetrates the tissue [wikipedia.org], but is also vital to any biological effects, and that's where the argument about nonionizing radiation [wikipedia.org] comes.
The current line of reasoning is more or less: the RF energy sure does not disrupt DNA since no matter how many qu
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Sorry, a strong magnet does not an EMF field make. EMFs are about varying fields
/me reads his own post and crawls under a stair before the booing starts.
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Sorry for replying twice, but I forgot to point out this: there are two possible applications for strong magnetic fields in a HDD factory: one is to "bake" those nasty rare-earth magnets (I haven't the faintest idea how they're made), and that would surely be a DC field (harmless), and the other would be an AC field to demagnetize any other components before assembly, including the blank platters. The latter is the one that can jam a pacemaker, since the induced current in a decent conductor can get really
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Sorry for replying twice, but I forgot to point out this: there are two possible applications for strong magnetic fields in a HDD factory: one is to "bake" those nasty rare-earth magnets (I haven't the faintest idea how they're made), and that would surely be a DC field (harmless),
Although you can magnetize a rare-earth magnet with a DC field, it's not the standard method. Normally you charge a bank of capacitors up to a few hundred volts and then discharge them through a coil wound around the material to be magnetized. This creates a pulsed magnetic field with a high peak intensity, which is what you need to magnetize the rare earth material. The current is high enough that the coil would melt if it had to carry the current continuously, but because it's only a short pulse there is
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Okay, so it's all about needing a *very* high current to align the domains, i.e. high coercivity (if such concept applies to ceramics). Thank you lots :)
And BTW, that magnetic spike surely creates an EM pulse that could really ruin your day if you stand nearby wearing a pacemaker.
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Of course it's not good for your health. Human beings evolved alongside mother nature, not power stations. The question is how much exposure does it take to do damage. Is it truly negligible, or not?
..and posting on /. as AC *MUST* be very bad for your health, after all; we humans evolved in the warm, comforting bosom of Gaia; not some soulless collection of electronic messages...
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Re:Dear WD, Could You Help Us End an EMF Debate? (Score:5, Informative)
You can't have magnetic fields without current or current without electricity.
Wrong. Static magnetic fields do not induce any current in static wires, otherwise we'd have infinite free electricity. Read Maxwell's Equations [wikipedia.org].
And while elecrtricity and magnetism are inseperably linked to Electromagnetic Radiation, they are not the same. EM Radiation is a self-propogating wave composed of oscillating electric and magnetic fields. Neither a magnet nor constant DC current produce EM radiation. You are very, very wrong.
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Friggen AC...
I see what you did there...
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Given the critical importance of hard disk storage (Score:3, Funny)
> Given the critical importance of hard disk storage in all of our lives, we thought you might want a peek under that hood, too.
Careful... what if you open the hard disk and there's a mouse inside who's been remembering it all for you? Then he sees you and realizes "Oh, crap, we need to do the experiment all over. Vogons! Oh, Vogons! Where are you...."
And then. Will come. The poetry.
well ... (Score:1, Interesting)
"Given the critical importance of hard disk storage in all of our lives"
is the exact reason I have not bought a WD drive in 15 years, back in the 90's you couldn't get one of their products that wasnt crap
after replacing my 120 meg drive 3 times in a single year, and a few later had the same issue with the next wd drive, except 4 times through the rma horse crap, I swore to never buy their garbage again
been quite happy with seagate and maxtor, they make a quality product
as far as my old 120mb drive its long
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Bah, kids these days... I still have a 20 MEG W.D. (dated 1991) that's still working, or at least was about 6-7 years ago, when I last used it to test something.
I also have a bunch of still-perfectly-good W.D. HDs in the 800mb and up range.
The five that run all the time here are all W.D. -- and they've been running 24/7 for 11 years, 10 years, two at 8 years; and the 5th has 2 years in this machine and another 3 or 4 years being used for random projects. My experience has been that their normal lifespan is
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The whole Barracuda 7200.11 series was a dead bust. I had a 500GB 7200.11 pack in with the "just plays dead" issue -- basically the SMART log overruns, the drive detects this on boot, then barfs. A bit later on they admitted there was a firmware bug, but their RMA policy didn't change... Basically:
- You pay for shipping there, they pay for it back. But you have to send it back in a Seagate-labelled shipping box -- sending it back in a normal "foam and ESD-bag" HDD box is grounds for them refu
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I appreciate that Seagate did eventually issue a firmware fix for the b
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The thing that cheesed me off most about the whole ordeal was that they issued a firmware "fix" that bricked the drives outright.
At that point I started to suspect their in-house testing checklist looked something like this:
1. Compile it.
2. Release to the customer.
3. ???
4. Profit!
I mean, seriously, it's a stinker of a bug, but there's a step missing between 1. and 2.: "Get a few hundred drives from the warehouse, do random number of R/Ws, image, set up for failure. Test to see if bug is fixed, also test for
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If you buy enough drives you'll eventually come across failures.
I did the same thing, the early years of western digital were quite awful. The heat typical WD drives put out were a big contributor to their failure.
So far my record of drive failure is 2 seagate within 5 years, vs 7+ western digital in 5 years.
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Maybe in the 90s, but for the past 10 years at least I've had no problems. Just about every drive I bought from 20 gig to 1000 gig has been a WD with no problems whatsoever. I think I did have a 40gb maxtor at one point but it died. And Seagate? Their recent problems with the 7200.11 drives has kept me from buying any of those.
I have been buying Samsung recently, as I've found them cheaper than WD and quite reliable. I've heard very of very few problems with Samsung, but I'm sure someone will chime in
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And somehow over the course of a decade and a dozen HDDs I suffered no WD related failures, and 1 out of 1 maxtor disks failed.
Did I get lucky, or did you get unlucky? Who knows?
Introduction (Score:5, Funny)
This article [>]
Re:Introduction (Score:5, Funny)
surely looks very [>]
Re:Introduction (Score:5, Funny)
interesting. [> Main meat]
Main meat (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, it is spanned [>]
Re:Main meat (Score:5, Funny)
among too many pages. [> Conclusion]
Conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus, I won't read it unless someone provides a print-link (please?).
p.s. Sorry... Tom's hardware really annoys me, I just felt I had to do it.
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Tom's used to be great but then they kinda sold out. I mean I think we all understand that it takes money to live but ugh it is indeed painful to go to that site these days.
I read the whole thing but wow was it annoying to do so. Had the article in question not have been so good I doubt I would have lasted past page 2. (The pics and videos were also very good.)
Looks familiar (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in the Texas Instruments semiconductor fab shop in Sherman, TX for several years. Same sort of setup, different substrate (plus they don't have any etching processes). The bunny suits can get hot, but the sweat under the gloves make some work almost impossible. Try changing the battery in your watch wearing those plastic gloves and you'll see what I mean. Sometimes the gloves just have to come off; then you have to clean the work area thoroughly to decontaminate it (sodium in sweat was the biggest worry). One thing I'm curious about: vibration. We were in north Texas, and needed quite a bit of vibration control, mostly isolation pads. The article doesn't say where the WD facility is, I assume California. I see some isolation pads under equipment, but how do you handle vibration in a seismically active area?
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OK, so they *do* have a photolithography/etching area, starting picture 25 of 41. Talk about tl;dr. I originally gave up less than half-way through. Went back for more when I had time.
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You can't wear thin cotton gloves under the "clean" gloves, to absorb sweat?? I'd think given all the thought that goes into making the bunny suits, they'd have some sort of sweat-wicking liners by now??
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I don't know but I'd guess the "thought" that goes into them is something like:
(1) keeps foreign crap out of clean rooms ....
(2) costs as little as possible
(999999999999) Is comfortable for employees to wear.
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Probably true :( But being sweat-soaked all day long can become a health issue (fungal infections, skin lesions, etc.), so you'd think if only to avoid insurance claims, they'd be thinking more about it.
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I didn't see anything about a surgical scrubdown for hands...
Re:Looks familiar (Score:4, Interesting)
I see some isolation pads under equipment, but how do you handle vibration in a seismically active area?
I used to work in IBM's Storage group in SanJose, California. This facility used to manufacture disk drives and storage subsystems. One of the manufacturing buildings was actually built on rollers so that if an earthquake hit, the building would stay one in place while the ground moved underneath it. This wouldn't eliminate 100% of the motion, but would dampen it so that the equipment specific dampeners wouldn't have to handle the entire load.
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I worked at Lucent Microelectronics in Allentown - not known to be a seismic area, true dat. However, the opto group in Breinigsville was right off of Rt. 222 and in the midst of a very busy beehive of distribution centers, with the concomitant truck traffic. Constant truck traffic. Neverending truck traffic.
All of the cleanrooms in Breinigsville were built on large springs to isolate them from the movement of the buildings; yes, the tractor trailers could affect them even though they were on a highway
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would that be atown pa? i used to live in phillipsburg nj miss the area. im now living in bloomsburg
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yup. Spent 5 years there. It's now the Iron Pigs baseball stadium. I have a commemorative brick from the Union Blvd. site with an Agere Systems plaque on it, from when they tore down Building 30.
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Where I worked in Covina they were running full scale dead load tests (a couple hundred thousand pounds I think) when the Whittier Narrows earthquake hit. There was no way to unload the machine without a warning so they just had to let it break. The USGS had at least one seismograph you could listen to in the area (tone modulated FM
Ooops (Score:1)
Their site just sputtered to a halt..
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Like a lot of their hard drives. I wonder when they are going to address their recent, shocking failure rate.
Drive backup of my brain. (Score:2)
How long until we have enough Hard Drive storage space to backup my own brain?
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How long until we have enough Hard Drive storage space to backup my own brain?
About 5,000 - 10,000 TB ought to be enough. At current rate of growth, we're talking about 20 years or so. Of course, that rate might slow down in the future...
All these complaints about WD drives... (Score:2, Insightful)
... has everyone forgotten the dreaded Seagate 'stiction' [patentstorm.us] problems? And those fun fixes [earthlink.net]? I was told they were due to contamination [lintech.org], but found out later, not so [slashdot.org]. But I banged my share of them around just to get them running long enough to copy off the data. Ah, Ghost [wikipedia.org].
Or the Miniscribe brick scandal [uta.edu], which not a quality control problem, illustrates how your favorite drive manufacturer can become a casualty of even bad accounting?
Is any drive manufacturer immune to problems [driveservice.com]? Nope [tomshardware.com].
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Is any drive manufacturer immune to problems? Nope.
After years of reading about drive history and reliability, I have to agree. Find one person who swears by brand A and hates brand B, and you'll find someone who's the opposite.
The only conclusion I can reach is that manufacturers suffer goofs on individual drive lines and the "goof rate" among major manufacturers is largely the same. If you care about reliability, look at the individual models and try to find out if it's a "goof line". You might still g
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Yep. Never heard of anyone getting those bricks recognized on boot.
WOW (Score:2)
If I worked at WD I'd be terrified (Score:2)
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If I were you I'd read the article to the end before writing. The last few photos show their SSD labs. Apparently they are well aware of the situation.
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That said, and this said so many times it's becoming
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you can get 512GB SSDs in 2.5 inch 9.5mm high form factor.
For a laptop that means about a 10% difference in max availble capacity if your laptop only takes the thin drives and about a factor of two difference if your laptop can take the thicker drives.
For desktops that means you can put two of the aforementioned drives in the space of a single 2TB hard drive so again the difference in capacity per bay is a factor of two.
I wouldn't call a factor of two difference in capacity per bay to be "far exceeding"
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The writing is on the wall.
No it isn't. At least not this decade.
Combine these, and you have a recipe for success:
1) New HDD controllers.
2) Gigabytes of cache.
3) Massive capacities.
4) Low price.
I eagerly await my 6TB WD Black with 280MB/sec read/write speeds. Bring it!
SSDs will dominate the low end computer and laptop markets - but not for a few years. It'll take a little while to get enough space for Windows, your apps, and your docs, but at a competitive price point. Right now the cheapest SSD is around $100, but you can get a 160G
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"Complex mechanical mechanisms inevitably get pushed aside for solid state. "
I know that's all the rage these days, but sometimes it is foolish to replace trusted, well understood mechanical systems with computerized versions. Just ask Toyota what a bright idea it was to leap into that.
Emo! (Score:2)
http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/525-10-western-digital-tour.html [tomshardware.com]
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It was funnier (and a bit scarier) when I read 'pens' as 'penis'. Took a lot of curiosity for me to click that link.
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Tom's Hardware got a tour of WD? I expect good reviews for WD gear on TH in the near future. .
I would not be surprised, they really had the ability to twist their tests some years ago when I last went there. I can't believe they where testing Nuendo performance by seeing how long it took to render the final project, when what really matters for anyone using the product was how many fx / synthesizers and audio tracks you can run in real time while working on the product. The final rendering took a very short time and is only done once (theoretically) when you are finished with the project. Of course
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