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X ` Man[_3_]

On 11/16/11 10:57 AM, wrote:
On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 07:31:33 -0500, wrote:

In ,
says...

On Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:59:18 -0500, X `
wrote:

On 11/15/11 6:36 PM, North Star wrote:
On Nov 15, 4:45 pm, X ` wrote:
One of the hard drives on one of my aging Apple computers has been dying
for a couple of weeks. It finally gave up the ghost yesterday. Called
Apple Care and the tech suggested about four different ways to try to
resuscitate it, to no avail.

So he made an appointment for me at the local Apple store. I showed up,
tech said "go to lunch." Came back 90 minutes later, new hard drive in
machine, running diagnostics.

No charge for labor or parts.

Love it.

Wow! just how old is that computer and was it still under warranty?

Two years next month. When I bought it, I paid about $100 for a three
year extended warranty. It's really nice...if I have a problem, I call
Apple Care on the phone and usually the English speaking person who
answers can work out the difficulty with me doing what is suggested. If
not, the rep makes an appointment for me at the local store.

I just reinstalled my apps and data back on the machine from a backup.

Since most hard drives are warranted for 5 years by the manufacturer
these days that seems like a great deal for Apple. Most computer
problems are caused by bad hard drives. That has been true for a long
time, pretty much since the end of the card reader and open reel tape
drive.

Usually the problems with rotating media is with a lot. You get about
10,000 that are bad and you need to have them replaced. They don't
recall them but, they do work with big commercial customers to get the
lots replaced. The consumer market, Apple is the consumer market, is
left to deal with it on an individual basis.

I never saw patterns like that and we were replacing about 400 drives
a year in Ft Myers.
We had total designs that were flawed and they had work arounds for
them. One particular drive had so much problem with the logic card
that it became a FRU. It saved the customer from losing data, very
important on a machine like an AS/400 where one drive takes out the
whole array.

In the market right now I would say the flawed design is the Western
Digital Caviar drive. That is about 70% of the drive failures I have
had.

I had a choice of drives for my server, so I bought four of these:

Seagate Constellation ES 2 TB Internal hard drive - 300 MBps - 7200 rpm

Internal - 2 TB - Seagate - SATA - SCSI - 7200 rpm
Constellation ES is the fourth generation 3.5-inch drive for enterprise
7200-rpm environments enabling cost-effective, highly efficient
enterprise storage with highest capacities, best-in-class reliability,
leading performance and optimized power and cooling. With its lowest
power consumption and highest temperature tolerance, it optimizes
chassis performance in tiered storage solutions. The only drive offering
a choice of traditional 3Gbps enterprise SATA interface for seamless
enterprise integration or the industry leading 6Gbps SAS enterprise
interface for a more reliable, scalable and sustainable high performance
enterprise solution. Constellation ES drives offer high capacity at 2TB
while providing enterprise robustness for Tier 2/nearline environments.
They are differentiated from 3.5-inch desktop drives by offering
enterprise-class reliability and superior data integrity with a UER of
1E10-15. Enterprise-class rotational vibration tolerance provides robust
protection from chassis and fan vibrations. The drives are offered with
either a 3Gbps SATA interface or a 6Gbps SAS 2.0 interface for superior
data protection at industry-leading speeds.

The drives were recommended by a number of users on the Synology user
forums. So far, no hiccups.