Hard drive controller errors abound - atapi Event 11

[dencorso]

In fact, Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital are all that remains.

Hic sunt dracones.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

In fact, Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital are all that remains.

Great graphic. Boils it down nicely.

Glad to see that all the worldwide government regulators are on the job protecting the consumer.

[dencorso]

I really wouldn't be surprised if, in the next few years, WD bought Toshiba or (less probable, but not impossible) the other way round.

For those, like us, that have use for older hardware, there still is some variability in the market, and it'll remain on eBay and the like.

Now, for those for whom only the bleeding edge really counts, well...

[jdub]

Yep, it sure can happen to any and all manufacturers, it's just a matter - as I see it - to not buy the latest model and check what has happened to others that got the model you want to buy.

Particularly in this case, I have BAD news Seagate is NOW Samsung, any drive you buy next can be either Samsung or Seagate (or both or viceversa or *whatever*) , example:

I was aware of their merger but I dont think any seagate drives are being labeled as samsung. I know for awhile they kept the samsung factories operating independently but i havent paid attention since '12 and dont know if there are any "pure" samsung drives being sold under the seagate name anymore.

About cables, you have to think about the frequencies involved, if you think about it almost every component in a modern PC is dealing with frequencies that are in the radio (or TV) ranges and above them, I suspect that even a very slightly defect in shielding or insulation of a cable (like the SATA ones) can produce an issue, which BTW may also be "local", in the sense that the same cable in a different case (and possibly with a different set of bends) may work alright, or by simply straightening it before re-installing it the tiny defect "mends itself". You'll never know.

Think at the good ol' times when you had snow on your TV set if a connector or shielding was even slightly defective... (progress is that when the same happens on DTV you either have "random" pixelization or downright completely loose the image )

I had thought of that since ive used these cables before and tried routing them through crazy places in different cases but sadly there's no way to *know* if somethings kinda off with a sata cable.

In fact, Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital are all that remains.

drive manufacturers

Thanks for that graphic, I'd forgotten who'd been folded into where and its time consuming to look that stuff up.

@CharlotteTheHarlot I dont think theres much the govt could have done to avoid the consolidation that happened. It was a razor thin margin market and businesses dont thrive in those. Honestly the only thing I dislike about it is the lowering of the warranty period and that Samsung went away. I never cared much for the other brands that dissipated.

I'd be suprised if there is a price fixing case against the HD manufacturers in the future about the post flood shenanigans. I wouldnt be suprised if some greedy executives got together but I also think certain nash equilibriums are reached in business where they all independantly step back and say "lets not get into a price war again... we like 30% margins... oh our competitors aren't lowering their prices either... *nod"

If anything im happy they have healthier margins, I wanted Samsung to stick around to honor the warranties on my drives. I'm not happy about margins over 15% but its not really up to me =/.

[jdub]

Edit: (**** database errors)

As a side note Id like to point this out: all that time we had 5~6 (or more) hard drive manufacturers no one for any length of time made an effort to allow consumer drives to be well suited to RAID. Sure for awhile certain batches could have a firmware value modified to enable TLER but often that got quashed pretty quickly. There was NO reason other than protecting the higher margin enterprise drive sales that were 98% the same **** product.

RAID always has been and always will be a cluster f***. The controllers were never cheap enough or reliable enough (for some reason they fail more often than any other PC part) to make sense for a home user to bulk store data. Do like I do kids and just fill hard drives then make backups and leave them in the fire safe. The convenience of being able to pluck a single drive and use it with your network media player or laptop or other pc outweighs any cost savings you *might* see by having a RAID 5 array. It does suck having to buy the same storage space twice though =/.

I actually remember some awesome looking RAID cards being featured in Maximum PC made by a startup called Netcell. Hardware XOR acceleration and 5 sata ports! I had high hopes for them making hardware accelerated RAID a commodity like NIC's etc but sadly they went under.

I ended up buying a bunch of their cards on ebay back in 09 or so for $10 a pop (i wanted some extras in case of failure). I bought several 1.5TB Samsung drives to build me a media server. Sadly they kept dropping from the array and causing rebuilds. I'd heard WD drives firmware supported TLER stuff but didnt want to switch. I ended up shelving a bunch of those drives... dammit I think I still have 2-3 that have barely been used that I should try selling. Anyone want a lightly used 1.5TB Samsung drive? I can give SMART reports on them.

Edited June 10, 2013 by jdub

[jaclaz]

I was aware of their merger but I dont think any seagate drives are being labeled as samsung.

Sure , I also don't think that there will be one, but you will have to concur that the label in the picture of the thread here is "confusing":

http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25629

Model: ST1000LM024 <- anything beginning ST should mean "Seagate Technology"

HDD p/n: HN-M101MBB/AVN <- this is a Samsung model

On the left: Samsung Spinpoint

On the right: Momentus ® <- name traditionally connected with Seagate families of drives

Below: Hard Disk drive Rated: DC +5V 0.85 A Seagate Technology LLC

Further below: HDD Mfg by Seagate Technology LLC

And below again: KCC-REM-STX-Momentus-B

Without quite a bit of patience and research it seems like a mad typographer prepared the label.

And if you find the datasheet it makes nothing to clear the matter:

http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/support/docs/samsung-ds/100698122c.pdf

they still seem like two distinct models...

But yes I think they are little by little completely removing anything with "Samsung" from their products labeling and datasheets.

About RAID, you should normally do raids with SCSI disks (or with SAS ones). (and yes that means $$$$ )

For a good RAID setup, it is logical to have "intelligent" controllers and "dumb" (but fastish and reliable) disks.

If you have a bunch of "intelligent" disks, they may *somehow* fight with the controller (and often they do that).

jaclaz

[jdub]

I really wouldn't be surprised if, in the next few years, WD bought Toshiba or (less probable, but not impossible) the other way round.

For those, like us, that have use for older hardware, there still is some variability in the market, and it'll remain on eBay and the like.

Now, for those for whom only the bleeding edge really counts, well...

I would be very surprised to see Toshiba buying WD - im pretty sure WD is the bigger of the two and with the amount of HD companies they've absorbed they seem intent on winning in the HD space.

[dencorso]

I really wouldn't be surprised if, in the next few years, WD bought Toshiba or (less probable, but not impossible) the other way round.

I would be very surprised to see Toshiba buying WD - im pretty sure WD is the bigger of the two and with the amount of HD companies they've absorbed they seem intent on winning in the HD space.

Sure WD is bigger. But maybe Japan (and perhaps not just Japan) would sleep better if all the technology pertaining to such a necessary resource as HDDs did not become again concentrated in the US. Or, in other words, politics may play a role at it.

[jdub]

Sure WD is bigger. But maybe Japan (and perhaps not just Japan) would sleep better if all the technology pertaining to such a necessary resource as HDDs did not become again concentrated in the US. Or, in other words, politics may play a role at it.

I'm not sure what you mean here. You think the Japanese govt might help Toshiba buy out WD or another manufacturer if it came down to it?

Honestly I don't think HD's are really critical anymore. If Japan for some reason suddenly had sanctions placed on it and couldn't get any new HD's I think they would be ok. Heres why: most people don't strictly speaking need more than 120GB~ on their laptop/desktop, SSD's and flash drives at current prices can provide that cheaply enough. For music/movie collection purposes centralization and streaming could adequately cover the needs even with SSD's. Remember Japan is a world leader in bandwidth and infrastructure so its not like their computers/phones wouldn't support streaming large amounts of data. Sure general computing and data services would see costs rise a bit, but only marginally and use cases that are shut out by that are almost never "necessary" anyways. I don't think it would quite be a case of "For Want of a Nail".

I could be wrong though.

Edited June 10, 2013 by jdub

[dencorso]

I really wouldn't be surprised if, in the next few years, WD bought Toshiba or (less probable, but not impossible) the other way round.

Sure WD is bigger. But maybe Japan (and perhaps not just Japan) would sleep better if all the technology pertaining to such a necessary resource as HDDs did not become again concentrated in the US. Or, in other words, politics may play a role at it.

I'm not sure what you mean here. You think the Japanese govt might help Toshiba buy out WD or another manufacturer if it came down to it?

Yes, precisely. But notice that when I first raised such hypotetic scenario, I took care to remark it was "less probable, but not impossible", IMO. If I had to place a bet, I'd bet on WD buying Toshiba's HDD division at some point in the near future, just as I understand you would, too. I just wanted to point out that there is at least one hypotetic scenario in which the reverse might happen: I'd never bet on that, however, because I agree its probability is quite low.