On Sun, 12 Feb 2012, Robin Humble <robin.humble@anu.edu.au> wrote:
the few desktop drives that we have tried in the server room have performed badly. they couldn't handle the vibration from other nearby disks or fans - a large percentage of them ran at highly erratic speeds and some barely worked at all. they were useless. we took them out.
Buying "enterprise" disks won't save you from such vibration issues as one company I once worked for found out the hard way.
OTOH enterprise drives generally aren't rated for lots of stops and starts that are typically needed in a home machine.
My observation is that the problem with "enterprise" drives is heat dissipation. Put a power hungry (and heat producing) drive in a confined space with little ventilation and it probably won't last long. Some years ago one of my clients decided that SCSI was good and got SCSI drives for all their workstations against my advice. When they had a bunch of drive failures due to hot summer nights (A/C turned off at night but workstations running 24*7) they converted to IDE and had much greater reliability.
I'm not sure how much of the difference is in manufacturing standards and how much is in firmware, but there is a difference.
There are some significant hardware differences such as the rotational speed that affect all aspects of the design.
apparently nothing illegal with down-playing the features of your cheaper product to increase sales of your more expensive product.
assuming competition between disk vendors for the high volume consumer market, I think downplaying features is unlikely.
You are assuming that people who buy the cheapest available SATA disks read the specs about the MTBF. I think that's a bad assumption.
Things that are expected to wear out don't have the same warranty protection.
pretty sure all hard disks are designed to die at warranty + 1 day.
I'm pretty sure that they aren't. Every disk that gets returned probably wipes out the profit margin of a few others. They would have to design them to work for a long time past their warranty to keep the number of drives that fail early below an acceptable limit. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/