Does any WD model have its own Wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 (I had one, it died just after its warranty ended but Seagate did send me a replacement after bitching about it for long enough.)
There's an IBM Deathstar (sold to Hitachi, sold to WD) model that has its own section, at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_fa...
Lost my first 3 years of programming thanks to a Deathstar... Still miffed about it, as I enjoy going back looking at my earlier code.
At least I learned to take backups, which has saved my butt several times since.
One way some companies and merchants deal with high inflation and increasing price pressure seems to be declining quality. I've seen similar things happening more frequently in different markets, not just tech. If you notice something like it, the best way to deal with it imo is ask for your money back, make it public if possible and boycott the business from then on. Customers need to penalize such behavior as much…
Indeed. Seems that Amazon is doing this more and more. Here in the US, I've just received a used (and damaged) Rode microphone, sold and shipped by Amazon 'as new'. And as you said, I returned it and decided not to order anything valuable from them, ever again. Still, I wonder if these (arguably illegal) practices are still worth it for merchants and companies, considering that there's no enforcement and the majority…
I've had this experience with several big retailers recently. One is B&H, who sold me a "new" Focusrite 18i20 4th Gen last month which had clearly been opened, cosmetically damaged, and returned. I've also had this experience many times with Sweetwater (musical instruments retailer). There used to be a sales rep there who would participate in a particular musician's forum that I was a member of and would get us a slightly better price than is standard if we ordered through him directly. Many people who did so, including me, received what was clearly opened and returned items, sold as new. I assume they do this because the vast majority of people would rather not bother and will just accept a small defect.
From the original heise.de article ( https://www.heise.de/news/Betrug-mit-Seagate-Festplatten-Dut... ): > According to readers, various retailers supplied the hard drives, with Amazon, JB Computer, Mindfactory and Reichelt being mentioned in numerous cases. Others mentioned: Alternate, Böttcher, Büroshop 24, Galaxus, Jacob, Kosatec, Maingau and Proshop - some of which are on the list of official Seagate retailers. Gi…
"messed up"?
My bet would be on someone in a warehouse mislabelling a pallet or something. Actual malice is a possibility, but it does seem odd to blow up an entire distribution business for some 16 TB HDDs, when HDDs aren't supply constrained at the moment. There were all sorts of shenanigans going on in 2020-21 when supply chains were disrupted (e.g. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/chip-shortages-lead-...).
> One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Regulators and prosecutors/lawyers would probably be the only ones laughing about that. AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite. > Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? If it isn't Seagate, it's someone else. Wasn't Western Digital caught s…
> Wasn't Western Digital caught selling NAS drives with some shittier technology than they were advertising WD switched their (larger; over 4TB iirc) WD Red drives from CMR to SMR without changing the model number at all, this is why I switched to buying Seagate. The SMR problem became particularly apparent when NAS users (like myself) switched out a failed drive with one of the same model in their ZFS pools, and res…
I think its actually 8TB and under that WD switched to SMR. All their drives over 8TB are CMR, last I heard.
Those Exos drives have been popular with homelab types because they are usually $50-$100 cheaper than prosumer drives that claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet. (The latter could be effaced by a bad bearing anywhere in your build, I haven't seen either claim tested by a review site) It's funny but in this case the enterprise product is the cheap mainstream product and the 10-20 SKUs aimed at…
Or the only difference of those specialized SKUs is a single parameter in the firmware making a different tradeoff for, lets say, random seek vs. sustained sequential reads/writes. A different cache strategy. Or whatever. Being able to charge $100 more for that is very worthwhile.
I think the "larger NAS" drives have better shock absorption, which is a hardware thing.
No matter what, it's a reason why you can't get any large capacity drive at Best Buy. They'd have room for one SKU but can't afford to stock an Amazonian variety of unusual types. I feel the whole industry has gone in a bad direction.
My workstation has a modern case that doesn't really have a lot of room in it for HDDs, so I added an external HDD for my sports photographs. I sure as hell don't get the bit about "serious external HDDs have their own power supply" because it is one more thing that can fail (get unplugged) and cause data loss. I'd get warmer and fuzzier feelings if the drive was powered off USB.
From the original heise.de article ( https://www.heise.de/news/Betrug-mit-Seagate-Festplatten-Dut... ): > According to readers, various retailers supplied the hard drives, with Amazon, JB Computer, Mindfactory and Reichelt being mentioned in numerous cases. Others mentioned: Alternate, Böttcher, Büroshop 24, Galaxus, Jacob, Kosatec, Maingau and Proshop - some of which are on the list of official Seagate retailers. Gi…
> messed up somewhere
How do you "mess up" the smart hours accidentally?
One way some companies and merchants deal with high inflation and increasing price pressure seems to be declining quality. I've seen similar things happening more frequently in different markets, not just tech. If you notice something like it, the best way to deal with it imo is ask for your money back, make it public if possible and boycott the business from then on. Customers need to penalize such behavior as much…
Indeed. Seems that Amazon is doing this more and more. Here in the US, I've just received a used (and damaged) Rode microphone, sold and shipped by Amazon 'as new'. And as you said, I returned it and decided not to order anything valuable from them, ever again. Still, I wonder if these (arguably illegal) practices are still worth it for merchants and companies, considering that there's no enforcement and the majority…
Things I absolutely won't order from Amazon: products you put in your body, products you put on your body, and electronics. Their business model and fraud are pretty much indistinguishable at this point.
> Wasn't Western Digital caught selling NAS drives with some shittier technology than they were advertising WD switched their (larger; over 4TB iirc) WD Red drives from CMR to SMR without changing the model number at all, this is why I switched to buying Seagate. The SMR problem became particularly apparent when NAS users (like myself) switched out a failed drive with one of the same model in their ZFS pools, and res…
I think its actually 8TB and under that WD switched to SMR. All their drives over 8TB are CMR, last I heard.
You're probably right, I forget which way around it was, but if I was to take an educated guess, I'd say that SMR on the lower capacity models lets them cut costs because the added density of SMR lets them use fewer platters?
Those Exos drives have been popular with homelab types because they are usually $50-$100 cheaper than prosumer drives that claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet. (The latter could be effaced by a bad bearing anywhere in your build, I haven't seen either claim tested by a review site) It's funny but in this case the enterprise product is the cheap mainstream product and the 10-20 SKUs aimed at…
> make special SKUs If your company is set up for it, special SKU's can be really cheap. Some can be software-only changes that even get applied after the product gets into the hands of the users. eg. during the setup process, the hardware phones home, and some server side component matches it up to the original sale at the retailer and figures out which features to enable. There might even be more SKU combinations t…
I was impressed in the 1980s when I heard about how 390 mainframes had a modem in them so IBM could phone in orders to unlock extra capacity if the customer needed it for a short time.
Today I think that's a sign to sell the stock of the company involved. It costs money to build hardware that is locked out, either the customer pays for it or the stockholders of the vendor pay for it, if the customer doesn't get to use it it just wasted. A vendor that even considers value subtraction is on thin ice and can only get away with it because there are barriers to exit. (This is particularly true of "fused off" features in Intel chips.)
Or the only difference of those specialized SKUs is a single parameter in the firmware making a different tradeoff for, lets say, random seek vs. sustained sequential reads/writes. A different cache strategy. Or whatever. Being able to charge $100 more for that is very worthwhile.
I think the "larger NAS" drives have better shock absorption, which is a hardware thing. No matter what, it's a reason why you can't get any large capacity drive at Best Buy. They'd have room for one SKU but can't afford to stock an Amazonian variety of unusual types. I feel the whole industry has gone in a bad direction. My workstation has a modern case that doesn't really have a lot of room in it for HDDs, so I add…
>No matter what, it's a reason why you can't get any large capacity drive at Best Buy.