[BBLISA] Whatever happened to Seagate?

[Rich Braun]

Nahum Shalman suggested:
> http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/02/20/on-disk-failure/ is a good read
> if you have the time for it.

Didn't have time for it all but it's a provocative argument: it boils down to
an argument against the conventional wisdom that buying cheapest-available
drives and monitoring them aggressively makes more economic sense than paying
extra for higher-quality ones.

My own argument boils down to what's happening in global business: the
reduction of HDD warranty periods is part of the megatrend of transferring
risk from corporations to individuals (and/or from larger corporations to
smaller ones).  In the 1960s, a successful argument was made that by mandating
a maximum $50 liability for credit-card fraud, corporations that issue credit
cards would generate enough additional business to cover their loss risk. 
Initially skeptical, corporations ultimately did benefit greatly from
increased consumer confidents; half a century later, we still have strong
incentive to use a credit card vs. any other form of payment invented since
then (and to keep Congress's mitts off the law which protects us).

By successfully transferring risk to consumers, HDD manufacturers have
decreased reliability by a whole lot more than the 1% vs. 2% cited in the
article.  I'm seeing my Seagates drop out at more like 10 or 20 times the rate
seen in the past.

I would've thought that by now solid-state would have doomed the future of
rotating magnetic media, but you can buy a consumer-grade magnetic drive for
$40/TB, an enterprise-grade one for $70/TB, but still have to pay north of
$500/TB for SSD.  Amazing but true: magnetic's still got a few more years
left.

<soapbox>
I won't try to split hairs over how much of a failure the unit should
tolerate: one bad block undetected until you attempt a read from it,
regardless of why, is too many. A drive which can't handle 65C environmental
conditions for long enough to detect the first failure before you've had a
triple-drive failure is not durable enough, period. The sheer number of people
who use these products should be enough to shame these companies into
producing a better product, but they've successfully transferred risk onto
individuals and small companies.

All this is to suggest that, presuming SSD actually delivers higher
reliability, people are voting to pay the extremely higher price for SSDs
rather than having to deal with swapping out filesystem software or implement
improved monitoring (picture Grandma getting a pop-up dialog warning her of
bad sectors on her HDD or SSD... monitoring isn't a solution for the masses).
</soapbox> ;-)

-rich