Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ST3000DM001

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 259 posts

Re: ST3000DM001

#181

Post by sinyug »

gruez wrote: post #169
sinyug wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but aren't the observations itself part of the standard narrative Only in a technical sense. When people talk about UFOs, they are not referring to known things like weather balloons, planes or fighter jets, but, instead, to something out of the ordinary. However, every "standard" explanation offered is one of these things. The standard narrative here is: UFOs don't exist.

>The standard narrative here is: UFOs don't exist. That seems like a reasonable narrative considering that the definition of UFO you used basically means "aliens".

You can come up with any number of scifi-ish explanations: aliens, humans from the future, lost/forgotten civilizations. But it could also be someone testing an uncommon craft.

Frankly, we don't know, and one of the reasons is, I believe, people are hesitant to take a serious look at it (or even talk about it) because they don't want to be classified as kooks.

Re: ST3000DM001

#182

Post by notacoward »

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…

Had a similar experience at a previous job. I'd debugged a problem with one system down to a flaky drive, which I extracted and took to our sysadmin. Without hesitation, he slammed it down on the floor.

"It's not flaky now."

The thing is, I knew a lot more than he did about how hard drives work, but he knew a lot more about how vendors work. A flaky drive might be hard to replace. A dead one wouldn't. Lesson learned.

Re: ST3000DM001

#183

Post by GekkePrutser »

> Paul Alcorn of Tom's Hardware argued that Backblaze used the drives in a manner that "far exceeded the warranty conditions" and questioned the "technical merits" of the lawsuit.

I would question this. Backblaze knows what they're doing. And at least they provide a relative reliability index as they treat all drives the same.

Re: ST3000DM001

#184

Post by wholinator2 »

wholinator2 wrote: post #180
Sebb767 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

I have a feeling that just comparing the numbers without looking at any of the logistics is just a convenient way to dismiss a theory you don't like. There's all kinds of things to think about like how 2% may be less than 100% but in an elastic supply of a globally distributed good, 2% of (total yearly) supply called upon all at once can be a _huge_ departure from the norm. Maybe the shortage isn't just a hard disk s…

Cant edit on phone but we can also consider the size of the drives. We can only guesstimate what sizes the NSA wanted but to your source we can say they needed 12 EB. Out of 150 million drives, there might not have been 4 million 3TB drives out there, this was 2014, maybe there was but they didn't want all the exact same drive, if you calculate that some of the drives are 2TB or 1TB the estimated numbers only get larger. I think it's totally reasonable that a single order of 12,000,000TB to a single location in Utah could grind the widespread consumer market to a halt for a bit, especially if they're almost all made in one place, which it seems most of this discussion is taking for granted.

It looks like you've picked only the most favorable statistics and ignored everything else in formulating your opinion/response.

Re: ST3000DM001

#185

Post by Inhibit »

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…

Ours was Western Digital. I worked at a VAR before the turn of the century and there was a rumored clean room problem at WD. We had over a hundred drives that failed but they flat refused to acknowledge the problem.

Ended up having to kill the drives on a dedicated rig and send them back to keep our customers from having issues. They knew they were bad but refused to accept them back prior to failure. For a while they were returning a failing drive on the RMA too.

Re: ST3000DM001

#186

Post by GekkePrutser »

csharptwdec19 wrote: post #149
grp000 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Hmm connecting directly to 110V is both dangerous as not limited in amperage (except by the fuse which is way too high for this purpose) and in some cases not enough (e.g. some ethernet has 1.5kV protection)

It would be better to slowly raise the voltage until it blows, leading to minimal pyrotechnics on the components (smoke/burning)

Re: ST3000DM001

#188

Post by fuckyouriotshit »

doikor wrote: post #152
daneel_w wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do drives in this type of stationary assembly (i.e. a server rack or a stationary PC) ever trigger their vibration protection? Barring of course during a bit of bumping in the server rack. I mean, these drives are not sitting in laptops. I have a hard time thinking the lack of this feature bears any weight on the huge failure rates Backblaze and discrete customers saw, though I'd accept the argument if there was a 2.…

As I understand it another driver in the same rack doing work is enough to effect the performance of the other drivers in the rack. This is why you use fancy expensive "enterprise grade" drives as they can cope better with it. https://www.dtc.umn.edu/publications/reports/2005_08.pdf > In the presence of an external vibration caused by adjacent disk drive seek operations the bandwidth performance of a consumer-grade d…

There's also this great example of Brendan Gregg screaming at hard disks to demonstrate exactly that sort of latency spike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

I don't know if the latency spike is caused by sensors detecting the extra vibrations and delaying a read or seek operation or if its just vibrations causing minor read-head errors which either require a 2nd pass (that isn't reported through to the OS via SMART) or some sort of extra processing to pull the correct signal out of the raised noisefloor.

Edit: person shouting at the disks is Brendan Gregg, not Bryan Cantrill.

Re: ST3000DM001

#189

Post by cosmin800 »

I don't know why anyone bothers to buy anything else than WD, seagate is making bad products for at least 10 years if not 15. Barracuda 7200.11 anyone? That was 12 years ago,I got a pair of Ironwolf 10TB, they failed in 6 months. How many seagates I saw failing? All - 30 - 50 God knows how many exactly. I have 10 years old WDs still running, actual powered on 6 years or so. I don't know why people are buying the same bad engineered products over and over again. Seagate should not exist anymore since long time ago.

Re: ST3000DM001

#190

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

rincebrain wrote: post #98

Before the ST3000DM001, the ST31500341AS became infamous, both for its failure rate, and its firmware bug. 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…

In the late 1990s there were a slew of Connor hard drives with leaking seals. The outside of the platter would become corrupt and that would proceed inward.

Seagate bought Connor in the middle of this and refused to honor the warranties. From what I recall a lawsuit followed and Seagate eventually capitulated.

Post reply on HN