On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 12:02:21AM +1100, Russell Coker wrote:
On Sat, 11 Feb 2012, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
If you look at the MTBF [1] figures of "standard" drives against "enterprise" drives, you will see that standard drives are manufactured to lesser standards and expecting them to last as long as enterprise drives is just a dream. Well the drive manufacturers SAY that there is a difference. There is
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. OTOH enterprise drives generally aren't rated for lots of stops and starts that are typically needed in a home machine. I'm not sure how much of the difference is in manufacturing standards and how much is in firmware, but there is a difference. our many sata disks are all "enterprise sata" and performance there hasn't been as predictable as the +/- 0.5 MB/s our SAS/FC disks achieve, but hasn't been bad. failure rates are pretty high with the "enterprise sata", but that's why they're in raids. most annoying is that (at least with this particular sata disk model and fw) they die in many many different ways - some of which appear to be 1/2 working but aren't really. it took a lot of work to get the SAS drivers fixed enough to handle these cases.
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.
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. cheers, robin