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ST3000DM001

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Re: ST3000DM001

#141

Post by squeed »

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…

Hah, I remember a pallet or the now-empty IA enclosures showing up at Noisebridge. They were super useful - a USB3-SATA adapter. I still have mine for occasional data spelunking.

Re: ST3000DM001

#143

Post by jeegsy »

simondotau wrote: post #57
colordrops wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases.

Where did this idea come from?

Re: ST3000DM001

#144

Post by Aerroon »

I have this drive. It throws a "caution" in CrystalDiskInfo due to too many reallocated sectors. It has about 58,000 power on hours. I used it extensively for years for video recording.

It held up well for me, but I don't really use it much since it threw that error. SSDs seem better for reliability these days - the TBW numbers are big.

Re: ST3000DM001

#146

Post by flyinghamster »

londons_explore wrote: post #100
Scramblejams wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Equipment cost is a huge problem there. You need a proper clean room if you're going to tear apart HDDs and expect them to work again when you reassemble them. Not to mention, the extremely precise tolerances involved would make mechanical mods a tall order indeed.

Firmware mods would be more doable, assuming it isn't locked down.

Re: ST3000DM001

#147

Post by jeegsy »

monadgonad wrote: post #84
Lammy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> coordinate an intricate conspiracy Nobody is alleging that but you. Personally I don't think either "surveillance system needs a way to store what is collected" or "high-volume customers have economic leverage to demand confidentiality" are particularly intricate concepts.

Colordrops said, "The Thailand story was a cover." This is the allegation. Not that the NSA bought a lot of drives and kept it secret, but that this purchase alone rather than the floods were responsible for the drive storage, and the flood story was fabricated. That is the alleged conspiracy.

I find that a number of conspiracy theories are 'debunked' by creating an obviously ridiculous strawman/rendition of the theory that nobody actually claimed.

Re: ST3000DM001

#148

Post by Sebb767 »

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…

> 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.

So, just for the fun of it: Forbes estimates a capacity (at the time) of up to 12 EB [1]. Assuming they used 3TB drives, they'd need 4 million drives for this [2]. This article [3] shows the market for consumer drives at about 150 million in 2013 (figure 7). So the NSA order would've been in the ballpark of 2% of consumer drives sales - insanely large at the face of it, yes, but probably not enough to cause such a shortage.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprin...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=12%20exabytes%20%2F%20...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2020/05/29/hdd-mark...

Re: ST3000DM001

#149

Post by csharptwdec19 »

grp000 wrote: post #44
myrandomcomment wrote: post #24

Back in the mid 90s I was working in IT at a midsized company. We used Compaq desktops (this is the Pentium Pro timeframe). The HD in the system where quantum fireball (IIRC). They failed at an amazing rate all in the first 3 months (30%). We called Compaq at one point and said, look we want replacement drives for all of our remaining systems. After much back and forth (stupid on their part as we had 1000+ machines o…

I'm not familiar with data center tools or terminology. What is a tazer in this context?

I would assume it had a purpose similar to an EtherKiller [0]. Most experienced Shop techs have at least a couple of similar tools to assist with recalcitrant RMA departments.

Unless it's a Creative labs product. You'll never RMA one of those. Ever.

[0] - http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/

Re: ST3000DM001

#150

Post by einpoklum »

qualudeheart wrote: post #132
einpoklum wrote: post #120

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?

I think it’s cute

Perhaps that's because you know the model number?

When people browse the list of titles on the front mpage, they should know what the story is about. So, in this case, something like:

"ST3000DM001 - A disk model number that would live in infamy"

or:

"Seagate's infamous ST3000DM001"

etc.

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