hard drive technology

[ZippyDan]

how has hard drive technology been around so long and yet failure is still so common

some possible explanations i came up with:

1. its cheaper both to manufacture, or buy, two hard drives for redundancy, than it is to make the extra effort in quality of manufacturing and processes that result in a nearly failure proof drive

2. its impossible to make drives fail less frequently at the sizes and speeds of hard drives (compared with something larger and slower that has moving parts like a diesel engine)

3. even though basic hd technology is very old and mature, improvements in hd tech like platter size and other manufacturing processes, are updated so quickly that each generation of drives never really has a chance to reach maturity as far as testing, qc, and learning from mistakes (for example the ibm deskstars, or comparing to cars again, the basic combustion engine itself has not changed very much in a long time, just the systmes surrounding the engine, so engines themselves are nearly perfect)

what is the usual cause of failure on an hd (i believe its the arm going out of alignment or bad heads?), and how have they not solved it after all this time?

btw, i am ignoring hard drive failure caused by impact in this post, as that is usually user error and not manufacturing error (and i know many advancements have been made in protecting hds from shock). heat failure and other preventable failures are fair game though

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

The way I see it, one problem just keeps getting worse and worse: heat.

But I do agree with you--it seems that operating hard drives in redundancy is almost a requirement now...

 

[Oyeve]

The worse thing for a HD is heat and turning it on and off. Those are the 2 top HD killers other than defects. HD technology is basically the same since inception other than SMART and NCQ and other "features" HDs are basically the same as it was 20 years ago. Good airflow on the drives and not turning the system on and off a lot will prolong your HD. I have systems that have HDs that have been running 15 years and they are still working great. A good PSU connected to a good line conditioner is a must these days as the HD capacity is much larger and a HD failure on a 500gb HD would be horrendous!

 

[Markbnj]

I'm still amazed that they work at all. Like CRT monitors, they are so complicated and flaky that absolutely the first second that there is something viable to replace them, they will disappear with a loud 'pop.'

 

[ZippyDan]

Originally posted by: Oyeve
The worse thing for a HD is heat and turning it on and off. Those are the 2 top HD killers other than defects. HD technology is basically the same since inception other than SMART and NCQ and other "features" HDs are basically the same as it was 20 years ago. Good airflow on the drives and not turning the system on and off a lot will prolong your HD. I have systems that have HDs that have been running 15 years and they are still working great. A good PSU connected to a good line conditioner is a must these days as the HD capacity is much larger and a HD failure on a 500gb HD would be horrendous!

if hd technology is basically the same since inception, how has it not been perfected yet

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: ZippyDanif hd technology is basically the same since inception, how has it not been perfected yet

Because it is innately crappy.

A HD has moving parts. Because of this, the head can crash. That is why the hard drive is unreliable.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: ZippyDan
how has hard drive technology been around so long and yet failure is still so common

some possible explanations i came up with:

1. its cheaper both to manufacture, or buy, two hard drives for redundancy, than it is to make the extra effort in quality of manufacturing and processes that result in a nearly failure proof drive

2. its impossible to make drives fail less frequently at the sizes and speeds of hard drives (compared with something larger and slower that has moving parts like a diesel engine)

3. even though basic hd technology is very old and mature, improvements in hd tech like platter size and other manufacturing processes, are updated so quickly that each generation of drives never really has a chance to reach maturity as far as testing, qc, and learning from mistakes (for example the ibm deskstars, or comparing to cars again, the basic combustion engine itself has not changed very much in a long time, just the systmes surrounding the engine, so engines themselves are nearly perfect)

what is the usual cause of failure on an hd (i believe its the arm going out of alignment or bad heads?), and how have they not solved it after all this time?

btw, i am ignoring hard drive failure caused by impact in this post, as that is usually user error and not manufacturing error (and i know many advancements have been made in protecting hds from shock). heat failure and other preventable failures are fair game though

Mostly #2/#3, and a little bit of #1.

As mechanical devices with complex, high-speed moving parts, there are many places where a drive can fail, and they tend to wear out over time. Eventually, all drives will fail, just as any internal combustion engine (no matter how well-engineered) will eventually fail. If you want an engine to run indefinitely, it needs regular maintenance and must be completely stripped and rebuilt every now and then. Unless you're willing to take apart your drive and replace the motor and actuators every couple years, it's not going to work forever.

On top of that, while the basic technology hasn't changed much, storage density (in MB or GB/square inch of platter) and speed has gone up tremendously. Manufacturers are constantly pushing to see how much data they can store, usually close to the limits of what is technologically possible at a given price point. I'm sure a 4200RPM drive could be made that only held 40GB but that had, say, double or triple the MTBF of the best enterprise-class drives today. But that drive would probably also cost many times more in terms of $/GB, and would perform far worse.

Finally, storage has gotten so cheap that it is, frankly, cheaper just to buy several drives and use them to back each other up than to design and build drives that would have acceptable MTBF rates for systems that need high availability. And for truly critical systems that need 100% uptime, you would need something like RAID anyway.

Things that kill hard drives:

Electronic failure (short/power surge/static charge taking out the PCB)
Motor/actuator failure (the mechanicals breaking down)
Drive surface failure (bad sectors building up over time until user data gets corrupted)

The first one is inherent to all electronics. The latter two are inherent to the technology of magnetic hard drives.

 

[SuperNaruto]

car's been around longer, why do they still fail ? same thing with hdd.. mechanical, heat, etc.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: SuperNaruto
car's been around longer, why do they still fail ? same thing with hdd.. mechanical, heat, etc.

Exactly! And a lot depends on how you take care of and treat any electro mechnical device. I got my first hard drive in 1986 - that is 20 years ago. Since then I have had at least 30 hard drives. In all that time I have only had one hard drive failure, and as I recall, that was in 1997.

As far as I'm concerned they have gotten better, and the storage space has increased dramatically since my first one - 10 MB!

 

[T9D]

Comes down to quality put into it. And quality of parts. There is so much competition and the prices and profit is so tight that they skimp where ever they can. If they dont then they lose market. They can make hard drives much much more reliable. It's just going to cost you more money. And they do make higher quality drives that are more reliable. It's just you and most of us choose not to spend that extra money. So we are stuck with less reliable drives. We take that gamble. It's the same as anything else. You can go to wallmart and buy some junk furniture that you will have to replace in 3 years or go buy some better quality at 10 times the price that will last 100 years.

 

[imported_Dekard]

reference high end SCSI drives... if you put them under a normal dekstop load patern they'd last forever... but who wants to spend $500 and up for a drive?

Personally, I have highhope for flash based storage eventually replacing harddrives. Not anytime soon, mind you.

 

[Oyeve]

If HDs were perfect and didnt fail then the manufacturers would be out of business. Thats probably the number 1 reason companies are using the same technology.

 

[Aluvus]

Originally posted by: Oyeve
If HDs were perfect and didnt fail then the manufacturers would be out of business. Thats probably the number 1 reason companies are using the same technology.

Processors seldom fail unless treated pretty roughly. Intel and AMD don't appear to be going out of business. Nor do Crucial, Corsair, or Kingston, even though memory rarely stops working.

 

[Oyeve]

Originally posted by: Aluvus

Originally posted by: Oyeve
If HDs were perfect and didnt fail then the manufacturers would be out of business. Thats probably the number 1 reason companies are using the same technology.

Processors seldom fail unless treated pretty roughly. Intel and AMD don't appear to be going out of business. Nor do Crucial, Corsair, or Kingston, even though memory rarely stops working.

Thats because they pop out a new chip every month and people will buy them. People upgrade their computers all the time, change chips with the latest, add more memory all the time. BUT, most will use the HDs from their previous build.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Oyeve

Originally posted by: Aluvus

Originally posted by: Oyeve
If HDs were perfect and didnt fail then the manufacturers would be out of business. Thats probably the number 1 reason companies are using the same technology.

Processors seldom fail unless treated pretty roughly. Intel and AMD don't appear to be going out of business. Nor do Crucial, Corsair, or Kingston, even though memory rarely stops working.

Thats because they pop out a new chip every month and people will buy them. People upgrade their computers all the time, change chips with the latest, add more memory all the time. BUT, most will use the HDs from their previous build.

...not usually, unless you're completely scrapping the old computer and transferring the drive over. Plus, if the drive's more than a couple years old, it's going to be much smaller than current models. The average user is also more likely to add a new hard drive to their machine than rip out and replace the CPU/RAM. Or, frankly, to just buy a new computer, which comes with -- surprise -- a hard drive.

The end-user 'enthusiast' market is a tiny sliver of what hardware gets sold (other than the video card market). The money's in selling millions of drives to OEMs, not selling upgrades to you and me.