Marketing says my drive was tested for 570 years before I got it!

[Elixer]

Datacenter drives undergo at least 5 million hours of functional testing, and over 20 million hours of comprehensive Interoperability testing in an extensive array of server and storage systems. Please see the product AVL list for more info.

This is for the WD Se line of HDs.


Not sure what WD does today, but, from http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/525-38-western-digital-tour.html it was stated that Excalibur can handle 5,000 units at once.

That would mean, the test pattern takes ~7 hours for writes, and ~3 hours for reads (for 2TB)

Assuming they do that for 24 hours for "consumer" drives (blue/green), and 36 for red/purple & 48 for black, and 96+ for Se/Red Pro/Re and the rest of the 'enterprise' drives, then, how exactly do they calculate the 5 million hour figure ? I couldn't find any white papers on the subject from http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/other/index.asp

So, basically, does anyone know how they calculate that 5 million hour figure?

 

[Dahak]

Volume,

They could say it was tested for 5 million hours but taking say a batch of 10,000 drives run for how ever long they need say a month(or whatever) , then they can say it was tested for 5 million hours

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Well... so every disk off the line gets three hours of testing.

That's separate from the 5m and 20m numbers. The functional testing and interoperability testing is probably part of the development process, and that's typically calculated as drive-hours. So a production run of 25,000 drives gets loaded up into a bunch of test racks and they flog it with a real-world workload for ~6 weeks. Boom, 25 million hours.

They're also going to tend to be nonspecific about whether that total is for a specific drive model, or about a bunch of different models that share common drive features.

We just spent millions of dollars testing these spindle motors for the WD Pro, now you want to test the exact same motors with an Re sticker on them? Get out of my office!

 

[Elixer]

That is a pretty weaselly way to claim 5 million hours.

I am surprised that they don't have to specify how they come up with that figure in their ads.

Oh, I think it was these forums, but, could be another one, but, their was a guy who worked at a recovery place, and he said that the platters and the housing were pretty much the only thing the same between the lines.
Motors, circuit logic, and some extra stuff inside were in fact different, so, usually, they don't just slap a new sticker on the same drive. Then again, this was at a time when there was only 2-3 different drives, not go through the whole color spectrum to name HDs. I wouldn't be shocked if a purple was the same as a red, which is the same as the green, except for firmware changes.

Come to think of it, that would be a very interesting article if a site would basically buy 1 of each drive, and open them up, and see what is the actual difference these days.

 

[Railgun]

Meh...not unlike calculating MTBF.