Seagate’s R&D facility — test chambers designed to stress-test emerging drive designs by the thousands
Anyone who understands home construction knows that you don’t pour concrete foundations in a rain storm — that’s asking for poor reliability and premature failure. Yet relatively few people understand hard drive reliability.
As with any foundation, we intuitively know that poor reliability means future problems. But what makes a hard drive reliable? How do you know if it was made to be reliable? And here’s a big one: Are you using your drives in a way that promotes reliability?
Most people have no idea how to answer these questions because the answers tend to get technical and manufacturers, as a rule, shy away from describing how they do things. Must protect the intellectual property, you know.
Well, not today. Seagate has decided to open its proverbial kimono a bit and spark a worldwide reliability discussion, starting with turning the spotlight on its own operations and design flow.
One Design Does Not Fit All
Understand that all hard drives are not made equally. Fundamental differences in physical components, construction, and firmware code differentiate the bottom of the drive stack (consumer-class client drives) from the top (enterprise-class mission critical nearline drives). Workloads placed on drives will vary from sporadic and light to constant and crushing. You can plug a client drive into a high-load data center application, but that drive is not made for that environment, and it will most likely fail prematurely.
By the same token, placing enterprise drives into a home PC would be blatant overkill. Sure, a mission critical drive in this situation would be ultra-reliable, but few consumers will ever need a drive to last beyond five or six years. They need drives built for their use model at an acceptable price point.
Such considerations are why the market now hosts a diversity of hard drive types. In the following chart, you can get a sense of some of the ways these drives differentiate according to their intended use.
Here’s the key point: When drives get used in the manner for which they’re built, reliability goes way up. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that one drive is “just as good” for a given job as another. You rely on different kinds of light bulbs for different lighting tasks. The same idea applies to storage.
A Nine-Stage Product Design Process
As you’ll see in this feature article, drive features and applications are only half of the reliability discussion. In cooperation with Tom’s Hardware, Seagate took a crew of journalist researchers into its Longmont, Colorado R&D facility to explore its Product Design Process (PDP), a nine-stage methodology the company uses to move drives from early concept through full-scale production. You’ll see how prototype drives get made, tested, and refined over many months.
Seagate pours hundreds of millions of dollars each year into its PDP in pursuit of making the industry’s most reliable hard drives. From blueprints to mass production and the thousands of hours of grueling tests and refinement in between, find out how the world’s best drives get made. See the data on how this process impacts Seagate’s final success rates and how it stacks up against other manufacturers.
This feature is only the first of several pieces we’ll be sharing to highlight different aspects of storage reliability. Learn what you need to know about pairing the right storage with your data. You might discover how to save some money, but, more importantly, you’ll have a much better grasp on why your storage is reliable and how to keep it that way in the years ahead.
