Enterprise versus "consumer" grade drives

I haven't built a PC with hard drives in a few years and I have to say I
am amazed at the hard drive market. [Note I have bought a few USB
drives, so I am referring to internal drives here.] First of all, it
seems everyone bought everyone else. Samsung went to Seagate. Hitachi
went to WD. Fujitsu went to Toshiba, which is presume is waiting to go
elsewhere. Well now I can see why the hard drive market never fell back
to the pre-Thailand flood prices. There are three, no make that 2.5
suppliers.

I always had the best luck with Seagate. So I do the usual market survey
(translation: read Newegg reviews) and it seems Seagate now sucks. Also
the 5 year warranty is 3 years, and that is on a good day. Seagate has
some drive with 1 year warranties. OK, so check out WD. Hmmh, they seem
to suck now too.

So is there any advantage to buying a Seagate Constellation versus a
Baracuda? Or Ultrastar versus Deskstar?

Have you noticed some vendors selling new drives without warranties?
When did that start happening?

FWIW, the system I plan on building will use intel SSD for the OS. I've
done two systems with intel SSD and no headaches, well other than having
to pay top dollar for the SSD. [I had a Corsair SSD arrive DOA. That is
my only non-intel experience.] I plan on getting two large hard drives
(normal, not SSD) and running RAID0. [Raid can be a pain if the
controller dies. Raid 0 may be inefficient, but at least the drives are
readable without RAID. I had a mobo fail that had a RAID 10 and a Raid 5
array on it. I got the RAID 10 going on another PC, but the RAID 5 just
refused to load. I had to go to the backup.]

Given that the OS with be on SSD and the magnetic media is on RAID 0,
would it still make sense to go with enterprise grade drives, presuming
they are more reliable that the consumer grade?

Incidentally, I noticed WD now has a 4Tbyte drive whose description is
similar to the Hitachi 4Tbyte. I'm leading towards using 3Tbyte since
they are substantially cheaper, though Fry's occasionally discount the
Hitachi 4Tbyte drives.

"miso" wrote:

snipped - just addressed the Subject topic in my reply

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...te,2923-2.html
Section labelled "Enterprise Drive Reliability"

On 10/7/2012 7:34 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
"miso" wrote:

snipped - just addressed the Subject topic in my reply

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...te,2923-2.html
Section labelled "Enterprise Drive Reliability"


Your reply here is a bit cryptic. Did you post a comment in this
article, or did you just want me to look at the "Enterprise Drive
Reliability" section.

I recall reading that Google paper when it came out and cursed them for
just not freakin' saying which drives were good. The line "enterprise
and consumer drives are made up of largely the same components" was
stated about 5 years ago, and may not be relevant today.

I see Anandtech has an article on drive for NAS, which glosses over
enterprise versus consumer.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/w...-the-premium/5

"miso" wrote:

On 10/7/2012 7:34 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
"miso" wrote:

snipped - just addressed the Subject topic in my reply

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...te,2923-2.html
Section labelled "Enterprise Drive Reliability"


Your reply here is a bit cryptic. Did you post a comment in this
article, or did you just want me to look at the "Enterprise Drive
Reliability" section.

I recall reading that Google paper when it came out and cursed them for
just not freakin' saying which drives were good. The line "enterprise
and consumer drives are made up of largely the same components" was
stated about 5 years ago, and may not be relevant today.


My reading of the Tom Hardware (1.25 years, not 5 years ago) is that
enterprise and consumer HDDs use the same mechanicals which means there
is no difference in their "grade" (per your Subject header). The
significant difference is in the firmware code in the interface to the
enterprise HDDs.

What in the last 5 years do you think has been significant in the
technology changes in HDDs? Yeah, now they're thinking of filling them
with helium but that's an incremental change, not a major change, and
you weren't asking about getting one of those. An article ONE year ago
is just as applicable as if written today. If you know of an article 5
years old that said the same thing, well, then you've further proof that
there has been little difference in quality or durability of enterprise
versus consumer drives over that last 5 years.

"´enterprise¡ and ´consumer¡ drives have pretty much the same annualized
failure rate". How does that not address your 1-line query "make sense
to go with enterprise grade drives, presuming they are more reliable
that the consumer grade?" You didn't ask for some white paper that
showed exhaustive testing and analysis to come to the same or different
conclusion. You asked a general question. I gave an article with a
general (conclusionally) answer.

I see Anandtech has an article on drive for NAS, which glosses over
enterprise versus consumer.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/w...-the-premium/5

Where did you mention in your planned config on using a NAS drive? The
HDD isn't what makes the difference in the NAS device. You're paying
for the extra logic encoded into the interface that the Tom's article
also mentioned.

If you want to spend the money, figure it is for your own peace of mind.
You paid more so it must be better. Nothing in your proposed hardware
config can make use of the enterprise-level firmware features so you're
paying for something you won't use and ending up with the same quality
mechanicals.

On 10/8/2012 1:00 AM, VanguardLH wrote:
"miso" wrote:

On 10/7/2012 7:34 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
"miso" wrote:

snipped - just addressed the Subject topic in my reply

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...te,2923-2.html
Section labelled "Enterprise Drive Reliability"


Your reply here is a bit cryptic. Did you post a comment in this
article, or did you just want me to look at the "Enterprise Drive
Reliability" section.

I recall reading that Google paper when it came out and cursed them for
just not freakin' saying which drives were good. The line "enterprise
and consumer drives are made up of largely the same components" was
stated about 5 years ago, and may not be relevant today.


My reading of the Tom Hardware (1.25 years, not 5 years ago) is that
enterprise and consumer HDDs use the same mechanicals which means there
is no difference in their "grade" (per your Subject header). The
significant difference is in the firmware code in the interface to the
enterprise HDDs.

What in the last 5 years do you think has been significant in the
technology changes in HDDs? Yeah, now they're thinking of filling them
with helium but that's an incremental change, not a major change, and
you weren't asking about getting one of those. An article ONE year ago
is just as applicable as if written today. If you know of an article 5
years old that said the same thing, well, then you've further proof that
there has been little difference in quality or durability of enterprise
versus consumer drives over that last 5 years.

"´enterprise¡ and ´consumer¡ drives have pretty much the same annualized
failure rate". How does that not address your 1-line query "make sense
to go with enterprise grade drives, presuming they are more reliable
that the consumer grade?" You didn't ask for some white paper that
showed exhaustive testing and analysis to come to the same or different
conclusion. You asked a general question. I gave an article with a
general (conclusionally) answer.

I see Anandtech has an article on drive for NAS, which glosses over
enterprise versus consumer.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/w...-the-premium/5

Where did you mention in your planned config on using a NAS drive? The
HDD isn't what makes the difference in the NAS device. You're paying
for the extra logic encoded into the interface that the Tom's article
also mentioned.

If you want to spend the money, figure it is for your own peace of mind.
You paid more so it must be better. Nothing in your proposed hardware
config can make use of the enterprise-level firmware features so you're
paying for something you won't use and ending up with the same quality
mechanicals.


If you carefully read the google paper, the quote about consumer drives
and enterprise drives being similar was made five years ago. Now you are
correct that the google paper is quite recent, but the reference in the
paper is old. As an example, if I write "Four score and seven years ago
our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in
Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal." on October 8th, 2012, one would say the actual quote goes back
to November 19th, 1863.

The only thing I could find was this 2008 paper for the general public from Intel:

http://download.intel.com/support/mo..._drives_ .pdf

It says enterprise class HDs have better head positioning mechanisms, ECC for their RAM, bigger head positioning magnets, anchoring for the spindle bearings at both ends of the shaft, air turbulance control, and better mechanisms for handling vibration and head misalignment, including separate processors for servo information and data.

Do the extra features apply only to 10,000+ RPM Enterprise HD or also to 7200 RPM models? Because don't many 7200 RPM and 6000 RPM consumer HDs have air turbulence control, including fixed plastic rods that out over the platters or covers between the platters?

Thanks. Interesting paper. Note that the magnet size may not be
significant since there are different magnetic materials. That is, a
smaller magnet can be more powerful than a larger magnet. It is hard to
say these days due to rare earth shortages, especially neodymium. The
shortage has lead to some loudspeaker redesigns. For a static magnet,
you can more or less size it as need be, but for a moving magnet, the
rare earth shortage is a big deal.

Much of what is in the intel paper could be seen from a tear down of the
drives. That is, you would see the ECC memory, spindle bears on top and
bottom, etc.

Variable sector size on a drive is news to me, but if an enterprise
drive has that, it would be in the datasheet.

Regarding vibration, I've been using Antec cases which mount the drive
in grommets. I have 5 years on this RAID 10 array, so I assume the
grommet scheme doesn't hurt. They are Seagate drives with (you guess it)
the 5 year warranty.

Reading the Seagate literature, they are no longer at One Disk Drive but
have a Cupertino address. I know the company went private. It seems like
the changes have been for the worse.

On Tuesday, October 9, 2012 1:18:58 AM UTC-7, miso wrote:

Regarding vibration, I've been using Antec cases which mount
the drive in grommets. I have 5 years on this RAID 10 array,
so I assume the grommet scheme doesn't hurt. They are Seagate
drives with (you guess it) the 5 year warranty.

Seagate once released a paper that said shock mounting a hard drive can increase seek time a lot, at least for small strokes. I can't find it at their website any more; all the technical papers there seem to have disappeared..

A friend of mine used grommets on his hard drives, but instead of those special screws with shafts wider than the threads, he used regular screws, and eventually vibration made some of them work out completely from the drives.. None of the drives fell out, but one drive was held in place only by friction against the grommets.

"miso" wrote:

On 10/8/2012 1:00 AM, VanguardLH wrote:
"miso" wrote:

On 10/7/2012 7:34 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
"miso" wrote:

snipped - just addressed the Subject topic in my reply

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...te,2923-2.html
Section labelled "Enterprise Drive Reliability"


Your reply here is a bit cryptic. Did you post a comment in this
article, or did you just want me to look at the "Enterprise Drive
Reliability" section.

I recall reading that Google paper when it came out and cursed them for
just not freakin' saying which drives were good. The line "enterprise
and consumer drives are made up of largely the same components" was
stated about 5 years ago, and may not be relevant today.


My reading of the Tom Hardware (1.25 years, not 5 years ago) is that
enterprise and consumer HDDs use the same mechanicals which means there
is no difference in their "grade" (per your Subject header). The
significant difference is in the firmware code in the interface to the
enterprise HDDs.

What in the last 5 years do you think has been significant in the
technology changes in HDDs? Yeah, now they're thinking of filling them
with helium but that's an incremental change, not a major change, and
you weren't asking about getting one of those. An article ONE year ago
is just as applicable as if written today. If you know of an article 5
years old that said the same thing, well, then you've further proof that
there has been little difference in quality or durability of enterprise
versus consumer drives over that last 5 years.

"´enterprise¡ and ´consumer¡ drives have pretty much the same annualized
failure rate". How does that not address your 1-line query "make sense
to go with enterprise grade drives, presuming they are more reliable
that the consumer grade?" You didn't ask for some white paper that
showed exhaustive testing and analysis to come to the same or different
conclusion. You asked a general question. I gave an article with a
general (conclusionally) answer.

I see Anandtech has an article on drive for NAS, which glosses over
enterprise versus consumer.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/w...-the-premium/5

Where did you mention in your planned config on using a NAS drive? The
HDD isn't what makes the difference in the NAS device. You're paying
for the extra logic encoded into the interface that the Tom's article
also mentioned.

If you want to spend the money, figure it is for your own peace of mind.
You paid more so it must be better. Nothing in your proposed hardware
config can make use of the enterprise-level firmware features so you're
paying for something you won't use and ending up with the same quality
mechanicals.


If you carefully read the google paper, the quote about consumer drives
and enterprise drives being similar was made five years ago. Now you are
correct that the google paper is quite recent, but the reference in the
paper is old. As an example, if I write "Four score and seven years ago
our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in
Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal." on October 8th, 2012, one would say the actual quote goes back
to November 19th, 1863.

Guess you missed my statement "What in the last 5 years do you think has
been significant in the technology changes in HDDs?"

I thought I posted this to the list last night. Anyway, here are some
of the innovations in the last five years of features incorporated in
enterprise drives.

Comparing a Deskstar to Ultrastar datasheet, in this case the 7k4000,
the Ultrastar has "adaptive error correction", "dual stage actuator",
and "rotational vibration safeguard (RVS).

RVS apparently isn't very new (2006 to 2007 time frame).

http://storagemojo.com/2006/04/24/ro...-wet-in-water/

In WD own line, they call it RAFF. It is in the RE and Raptorline.
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/librar...579-001079.pdf