I do have one rule that I follow that I think makes for a somewhat
better chance of getting a reliable drive... don't get the highest
capacity drive available. Although some capacity increases are done
with rather conventional methods (I think the recent increase from 1.5TB
to 2.0TB was done using 5 platters rather than 4) sometimes it's done
with very new technology and under competitive pressure. Working OK in
the lab and working OK off the end of a high volume manufacturing line
perhaps with totally new and untested components are different things.
I prefer to give the technology a bit of time to settle. I'm frankly
quite amazed that today's hard drives work at all. It might be
instructive to know how many read operations on 1TB+ drives succeed only
because the read errors were recovered by a large number of ECC bits. :-)
Chuck Norcutt
Moose wrote:
> On 7/3/2010 4:52 PM, C.H.Ling wrote:
>> I have been working in electronics manufacturing for over 20 years,
>> I know it very well that company culture will have big influence on
>> the product quality/reliability. ...
>>
>> Everyone is doing product cost reduction (making changes), the
>> companies which truly put quality in the first place will do better
>> than the others and I can assure you that not every company is
>> doing the same.
>
> I don't disagree with you at all. I'm talking about the other end,
> the poor souls who wants to choose the best HD. I still believe it's
> impossible to know enough to make a decision that makes a difference,
> a least without spending enormous effort - only to discover that one
> has to start over again, as models have been discontinued and new
> models reached the market.
>
> Even the best manufacturer doesn't really know how a new model will
> fare in the real world until there are many thousands in service.
> Back when I spent a lot of time reading reviews, I encountered
> examples of this. A model would have problems and the manufacturer
> would change the drive, then later users would say it was fine.
>
> The least cost solution, in time and sanity, at least, still seems to
> me to be the one I outlined.
>
> Moose
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|