joule capacity of surface-mount resistors

ha, even the label on that drive looks cheap. The crappiest drives made since the 1980s I ever saw were "JTS" and from India. The excitement in openening a stryofoam tray of those drives was finding on that would last long enough to survive an installation of windows.

How about a nice MOV? Put a window in the enclosure so the flames can be used as some sort of "sevice" indicator.

and

open

1 inch

Once you remove the dark, cluttery buttons, the actual waveform looks like it was copy and pasted from an a cell phone.

I think I've used or seen drives from about half of these manufacturers.

I've also had "dead out of the box" failures. I purchased spare drives when I setup a RAID 0+1 array of 5 drives. I think there were

3 spare drives. When the operating drives started to show signs of impending doom, I replaced the failing drive with a new identical drive from the spares collection. A few days later, another of the running drives started to show symptoms, which was also replaced by one of the spare new drives. Then the first replacement started to fail, followed by another of the running drives. Obviously, so many failures, including one new drive, must have a common cause. I wasted considerable time chasing power problems and replacing the Mylex RAID controller. I eventually determined that the drives really were the problem and that the life expectancy of a running drive and one that had been languishing in the box, were identical. I could not find the "post warranty destruct timer" device on the PCB. All the drives were replaced with a different brand, which worked reliably for at least 5 years, when my situation changed and I no longer serviced the account.

Sometimes I wonder if it's like the bulging electrolytics problem. Once the manufacturers find a mechanism that produces a failure immediately after the warranty period is over, there's a financial incentive to continue doing it the same way. I know it's possible to have a drive run nearly forever. I have a 1986(?) vintage Conner Peripherals 1GB drive in the ancient Xenix server in my palatial office, that has been running continuously for about 25 years with no evidence of impending failure. I would gladly trade half or more of the drive capacity for a major increase in reliability. Better life seems to be something customers want. When I ordered "enhanced reliability" drives from Dell about 4 years ago, which turned out to be Samung drives, they all died after about 1 year of intermittent service.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

[...]

Maybe, but drives are pretty interchangeable so there is a reputation to protect I think. Recently I took one apart that was a couple years old, out of curiousity. There very clever things in there, beautifully engineered and optimised, must be really state of the art manufacturing techniques. Pity they break so often...

Similar here, I now assume "enhanced reliability" is just an extended warranty paid for by the cost bump.

--

John Devereux

I think that the 10,000 RPM "Enterprise" disks intended for servers are different. I fitted one to a desktop Mac some years ago. What a difference in performance it made! And you could tell it was there by the deep hum when it ran.

Joe Gwinn