SSD vs. Rotating Media

Sure they can.

I hope they're not some of the models on here:

One of the Seagate 1.5TB drives had over 23% cumulative failure rate.

On Tue, 03 May 2016 08:52:13 -0400, JW Gave us:

I have been Seagate brand loyal for decades, but my only failure was a

All I wanted was data recovery, and all they offer is drive replacement. Data recovery is hundreds of dollars even though there was no hard physical failure on the drive or heads. It was the damned spindle driver transistors (FETs). It would not spool up and finish its internal POST routine. Really pissed me off too because the drive was fine just prior to that. Likely only off by a few RPMs.

I am still absolutely a Seagate guy though.

Except now for solid state stuff.... Samsung is king.

Hm. The IBM PC/XT made a big deal out of the fact that you could back up its 10Mb internal (full height, 5-1/4") hard drive on 360K (DS/DD,

Frank McKenney

On Tue, 03 May 2016 10:24:23 -0500, Frnak McKenney Gave us:

I had a full height 10MB Tandon drive. On my 286.

I also had a 5.25" 360k Tandon floppy drive on my Atari unit.

because it has been in service there far longer than any of the others.

NT

Nope. Those are all 3.5" drives. The USB drives that I use for backup are all 2.5" drives.

What I've learned from such reliability studies is that I can't buy by brand because every vendor has their winners and losers. I also learned from the Google study that S.M.A.R.T. isn't very good at predicting a failure. My own observation is that the whole idea of a hard disk reliability study is useless because by the time a sufficient quantity of drives are purchased, installed, run for some time, data collected, and analyzed, the drives are obsolete. They are then replaced with the next generation of drives, which starts the process over again from scratch. If the reports show that a particular model drive has superior reliability, it does me no good because I can't buy any.

I just added 3 more USB drives to my collection. Two 1TB Toshiba's and one 2TB Seagate.

Yeah, that's bad. Maybe I've been lucky, but the only real failures in my collection of backup drives has been due to clumsiness, overheating by leaving one on my car seat in the sun, or bouncing them to death in my car. Also, one dead on arrive Western Dismal drive.

DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno wrote in news:pmdhibpk1c32492uti2i1e625bknh9mboj 4ax.com:

Quite. But brand does matter, there is at least one brand to stay away from. Unfortunately I don't remember the name, but not one of the big players and terrible MTTF specs.

And their report explained that IRL failure stats were not a major reason to choose one HDD over another.

NT

On Thu, 5 May 2016 07:06:26 -0000 (UTC), John Doe Gave us:

Stalk much, you top posting, group adding, totally clueless Usenet dumbfuck?

Perhaps Seagate, which is hardly an obscure manufacturer, but does have its problems (based on the Backblaze report):

Some of this is the result of the flooding of hard disk drive factories in Thailand that were flooded in 2011. My guess(tm) is that all the affected drive manufacturers were shipping whatever they had on hand, including floor sweepings.

Here's the link to the 2007 Google disk failure report: I don't know if 9 years of technical progress has really changed anything.

My limited experience at work with server drives shows that IBM/Hitachi drives are much more reliable than Seagate/Maxtor.

However, that can change at any time. And Hitachi has been sold to Western Digital so who knows how it is today.

(my experience with WD is neutral, we don't have many WD drives)

The one source that is in the best position to know the reliability of any given drive is, of course, the manufacturer. So far I've had reasonable success simply buying drives that have warranty periods of 3-5 years. These drives generally don't have the greatest capacities, nor are they sold at the lowest cost. Most drives sold these days have very short warranty periods, so the outcome in these cases shouldn't be much of a surprise.

no not one of the majors. Might be Freecom, but not sure.

NT

I've seen aluminium wind chimes,

I would think the thermal coductivity would make the composition obvious when handled.

On 14 May 2016 07:16:23 GMT, Jasen Betts Gave us:

Aluminum platters ring like a bell. I have had stacks of them and used to toss them into the air and strike them and they sang out just fine..

When they are captivated, they get damped. So would a glass platter.. Period. End of line.

Aluminum platters for wind chimes: (1:04) (3:46) (0:40) (3:30) Since the authors drilled holes in some of the wind chimes, I can assume it's aluminum.

I stand corrected. You can buy aluminum bells and chimes: Wind chimes are hardened aluminum. I was thinking of the dull thud made by dead soft aluminum sheet metal. Hardened aluminum does sound better than a dull thud.

I just happen to have some aluminum 3.75"D x 0.032" aluminum hard disk platters handy. Someone was selling them at a local flea market and I bought a pile. As a chime, they don't sound very melodious as compared to what I would expect a similar glass disk to sound. I don't have any equal size platters made from glass, or I would make recordings and display the spectrum using Spectrum Lab. I tried a Petri dish, but it was too thick.

Some details on the physics of bells:

Thermal conductivity isn't easily measured by inspection but possible with a soldering iron and thermometer. Beating on the platter with a hammer was quicker and easier. Or, I could weigh them, calculate the volume, and use the difference in density to distinguish whether it's glass, aluminum, or ceramic.