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I could have sworn it was a similar 1.5TB drive that most infamous. Ah well.
In 2012 I was working at the Internet Archive. I remember the 2011 Thailand floods restricted the supply of hard disks and pushed up prices. The best deal we could find was buying these Seagate hard disks as external drives at retail from Costco. We picked up a truck load. Then had somebody with a screw driver remove them all from the enclosures and install them in new servers. The error rate was high, the drives did…
The Thailand story was a cover for the NSA buying a huge number of drives for the new data facility in Utah.
One thing I learned recently, which made the effect of the 2011 flood on the HD market worst: Aramco purchased a big chunk of several months of the world supply of hard drive to recover from Shamoon in 2012, by replacing every HD in the company [1]
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The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. How many people work in Thailand's hard drive manufacturing plants? Hundreds? Thousands? How many people in the logistics channels? How many people are vending food to these employees? How many people in the US Government? Oh, and pulling this off would also require co-ordination with Thai Government. Th…
> The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. While I don't know anything about the theory being discussed here, the pervasive belief in Santa Clause among children disproves your point entirely.
So unless we all are living in a very well orchestrated NSA Truman show, it's unlikely that your argument applies.
Some anecdata: I have exactly two of these drives in my home NAS. The other two were WDC_WD30EZRX, one of them already failed, while the ST's are still going. All purchased in 2016.
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Source for this claim? Sounds entirely like unfounded speculation. (Wikipedia page on the facility in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center )
Yeah maybe it was just for the construction kickbacks and the datacenter is actually empty.
https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=2118801&itype=CMSI...
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/nsa-tries-to-keep-its-wate...
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Correct. To the other comments. We where a good customer that experienced an amazing stupidly high failure rate in a part that others also reported the same issue. The cost of deploying these systems and having them fail randomly broke planning and wasted the teams time and impacted our IT cost metrics. The cost of the support ticket, time and replacing and re-imaging a system was not free. We of course tried very ha…
I mean at first it sounded like fraud, but then you explained it, and then it really sounded like fraud.
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These things always happen in the weekend don't they? When I managed a large network of servers, it seems that all the outages happened during parties and/or the weekend.
Issues seem to happen as you implement the long desired upgrade/fix/repair too. Things hold on for years then crap out right at the final moment.
The latter, if memory serves, was the bug where the drive had an internal event log that was a ring of 256 entries, and if it was at the last entry on boot, the hard drive's code on bootup for handling rolling back to 0 was (usually) broken, causing the hard drive to not start up any more. (I say usually because for this particular bug, regardless of whether I'm associating it with this model correctly, there were anecdotes of repeatedly power cycling the drives causing them to eventually boot normally, whereupon you could eventually apply the firmware update.)
If you look up that model, you can find people commenting on stories about the ST3000DM001 asking "so when's the class action for the ST31500341AS?"
edit: I see someone else in this discussion also remembers that family even better than I, because I forgot (or didn't update fast enough to encounter) the bug that was present in the first firmware update to fix this.
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The Thailand story was a cover for the NSA buying a huge number of drives for the new data facility in Utah.
The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. How many people work in Thailand's hard drive manufacturing plants? Hundreds? Thousands? How many people in the logistics channels? How many people are vending food to these employees? How many people in the US Government? Oh, and pulling this off would also require co-ordination with Thai Government. Th…
Just because a customer orders a few gazillion of product x and wants to keep it quiet doesn’t make some kind of nutty conspiracy theory. It happens all the time. The Thailand floods drew down production even more, but without the giant order, there wouldn’t have been the same impact.
Fun fact, any time two or more people want to keep something on the DL , it’s a conspiracy. Nearly everything that an intelligence agency does, is de facto, a conspiracy.
So why did this drive fail? Has nobody dissected it to figure out exactly which component no longer functioned correctly?
Every time a submission like this pops up I expect someone who worked at Seagate during that era to pipe up and explain what went wrong and why ... but I haven't seen it yet. Surprising.
It's a bad sign when tech complexity gets out of the expertise of a hobbyist - I believe that's the start of a stagnation of that technology as new young engineers never get excited about disassembling and modding hard drives in their free time, and in turn it becomes paid engineers only who, I suspect, are less innovative.
When was the last time you heard someone who had modded their hard drive to, for example, seek faster?