WD stage whispers up new AV surveillance drive Western Digital has a new disk drive for audio-visual applications with a claimed best-in-class reliability which is far below enterprise drive reliability levels. The target markets are surveillance camera systems, digital video recorders and other audio-visual applications. The WD AV-25 is a 2.5-inch SATA 3Gbit/s drive with …
I couldn't believe what you'd quoted WD as having said, but I looked it up on WD's website, and there it was in their blurb about the AV-25:
"Preemptive Wear Leveling (PWL) - The drive arm frequently sweeps across the disk to reduce uneven wear on the drive surface common to audio video streaming applications. "
Ummm... it's a HARD disc drive, not a floppy diskette. The head is NOT supposed to touch the media surface while the media is spinning -- that's called a "head crash".
Is this some bad, new technology which slowly, lightly, scrapes away the metallic plating in order to eventually degrade the drive's reliability and require its replacement?!
Did WD's marketing droids become confused when creating the "features" list?
Please, let's have some technical evaluation of absurd manufacturers' statements, and additional investigation (perhaps a call to WD HQ?) when appropriate.
HA! 1Million Hours MBTF
That is 114 Years!
I seriously doubt that ANY of these drives are functioning after 20 years let alone 114.
How the hell do these companies legally come up with ridiculous figures such as these.... Do they have time machines? Set up 100 PCs with these drives, constantly reading and writing, then jump in the Tardis, go ahead 100 years and check on the findings?
This is marketing BS of the highest order.
The first computer with a hard disk was in 1956. 54 years ago. Half the life they claim for these disks.
I've had numerous disks in the last 20 years. I had a stack of Maxtor's about 10 years ago with a claimed MTBF of 150,000 hours (17 years). None of them are still working, and I always found Maxtor to be amongst the more reliable. Seagate seemed to fail about 5 days after the warranty expired.
The industry needs to rethink these bullshit claims. The technology is moving so fast there is no way they can make any realistic claim on the predicted life. If they can, why don't they put their money where their mouth is and give a 20 year warranty.
"This is a joke, right? Do you even know how MTBF is calculated?
Do some reading chucklehead."
Actually, I did and I still believe that the MBTF value in non-serviceable computer components is utter BS.
I wasn't saying MTBF is BS. I was saying that its use as a marketing term is.
There are several MTBF calculations floating around, let's start with the admittedly dubious one on WikiPedia:
MTBF is defined as "SUM(downtimes - uptimes)/failure-count" of a system.
Where a 'downtime' is the exact time of failure and the 'uptime' is the the exact time of the repair.
Wiki: "The MTBF is typically part of a model that assumes the failed system is immediately repaired (zero elapsed time), as a part of a renewal process."
Now consider that Hard disk drives are NOT USER SERVICABLE and therefore cannot be repaired. This would make the MTBF figure BS as the uptime can never occur. So your calculation would be (X-∞)/1 = -∞ Insert your own value for X.
So in actual fact, by this calculation - any device which cannot be repaired has a MTBF of minus infinity.
Granted this is a huge oversimplification.
There are other calculations floating around, such as 1/sum(MBTF of all components) which actually start approaching some semblance of sanity... but you know what? I can't be bothered to type them out and critique them for being used in this context.
MTBF has relevance in some fields, but they have no business being used as a marketing term on a non serviceable device - they should be using MTTF instead, and going on personal experience with WD - that would be <2 years
Chucklehead indeed. Try putting forward an actual argument. Prat.
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