ST3000DM001 • Hacker News Board

Re: ST3000DM001

#111

Post by andai » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

K0balt wrote: post #99

simondotau wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At the time it was kind of an open secret in the industry. The floods were a convenient explanation, but a very large order from a client with a confidentiality clause ( very common in the industry) was widely known to be the main reason for short supply. It is possible that this client was someone else other than the NAS er... NSA but it is not very likely and at the time it was conventional wisdom among insiders th…

One of my favorite memes (in the sense of memetics) is the meme "conspiracy theorist". This phrase was weaponized by the CIA as a memetic self-defense mechanism. (Their own documents admit this!) But if you tell someone this, the meme itself is triggered in their mind, and their instinct is to not believe you, because you sound like a conspiracy theorist.

Re: ST3000DM001

#112

Post by andai » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 9:03 AM UTC

One of the sources for this article is an interesting write-up by Backblaze about their experiences with these drives: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/

Re: ST3000DM001

#113

Post by ChrisRR » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 9:03 AM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #29

edward wrote: post #19

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.

So many conspiracy theories fall apart when you give it the smallest thought

Why not just start a rumour claiming the price is increasing due to huge demand?

Re: ST3000DM001

#114

Post by doikor » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 9:05 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #76

So why did this drive fail? Has nobody dissected it to figure out exactly which component no longer functioned correctly?

All I have seen is not having rotational vibration sensors.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-hdd-failure-lawsui...

> The Seagate 3 TB models failed at a higher rate than other drives during the Backblaze deployment, but in fairness, the Seagate drives were the only models that did not feature RV (Rotational Vibration) sensors that counteract excessive vibration in heavy usage models -- specifically because Seagate did not design the drives for that use case.

Re: ST3000DM001

#115

Post by ChrisRR » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 9:06 AM UTC

anticodon wrote: post #106

simondotau wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But where would a person speak to disclose the secret? Internet is very effectively censored by the US monopolies now. If something is not indexed by Google, it's effectively non-existent. FAANG censorship is fast and effective. E.g. there were many important US bureaucrats involved in the Theranos scandal (even current US president). When I try to find anything related to that matter now, Google returns pages with m…

Literally anywhere, the internet isn't consored anywhere near as much as you think.

If someone posted a plausible/verifiable account of what happened in a HN thread, then it would've made it halfway round the world before the NSA could take it down

Re: ST3000DM001

#116

Post by donatj » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 9:07 AM UTC

I genuinely don’t know why anyone buys Seagate drives.

Every single one I have owned with any decent level of usage since the mid-90s has died on me after a couple years. I actually bought a 4 Disk Seagate NAS and all 4 Seagate drives have since been replaced with HGST drives one by one.

Re: ST3000DM001

#117

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

mordae wrote: post #90

th0ma5 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean at first it sounded like fraud, but then you explained it, and then it really sounded like fraud.

Nah, it's fair. We've had to fry our failed HDDs because otherwise the vendor would replace them with those we've returned previously. Then they would not endure RAID rebuild and the cycle would repeat.

The fraud is theirs.

But you're supposed to hide the murder weapon.

Re: ST3000DM001

#118

Post by londons_explore » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 9:09 AM UTC

tester34 wrote: post #105

londons_explore wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's sad that the hacker/maker community doesn't have enough knowledge/skill/inclination to disassemble this kind of thing and figure it out for themselves. 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 tu…

haha, it's even better if you replace in your comment hard drives with CPUs

But people do mod CPU's... By overclocking, by hacking into SMM mode, by liquid nitrogen cooling...

People also make their own toy CPU's for fun with quite some regularity - using FPGA's and other tools, the same as the pros.

And people decap and reverse engineer new CPU's like Apples M1.

Re: ST3000DM001

#119

Post by donalhunt » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

K0balt wrote: post #99

simondotau wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At the time it was kind of an open secret in the industry. The floods were a convenient explanation, but a very large order from a client with a confidentiality clause ( very common in the industry) was widely known to be the main reason for short supply. It is possible that this client was someone else other than the NAS er... NSA but it is not very likely and at the time it was conventional wisdom among insiders th…

All big manufacturers bought whatever supplies they could get their hands on as soon as the impact of the floods was clear.

Companies are uniquely positioned to minimise risk in their ability to execute.

I remember this period well and aware that a number of large players basically bought up whatever supply was available to cover their needs in the short to medium term. The result was that retail pricing more or less doubled (if you could even get drives).

Re: ST3000DM001

#120

Post by einpoklum » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 9:12 AM UTC

Congrats on what is possibly the least informative title I've seen on HN for years...

seriously, can't something be done about titles for URLs?