Hitachi DEATHSTAR (deskstar) drives

[The village idiot]

Yes this is a rant, and the rant can be equally divided between to different companies.

Well it seems that the Hitachi made deskstar may still deserve the nick of DeathStar. Just found 1 (of 16) dead DeathStar drive in our Avid LAN Share to be dead after less than 1 year. This particular unit was a 185GB ATA drive, part of an array that formed a 2.5 TB drive that we use with our 16 Mac Avid Xpress DV pro (the pro does not deserve to be capitalized, as it is nothing like pro support from Avid). Now here is the fun part, with that many drives you would automatically think RAID 5, or at least some kind of fault tolerant arrangement right? Nope, that was another several thousand dollars on top of an already $40k+ server. What's so special about this server... NOTHING! It is simply a win2k server running 3ware IDE controllers (with raid on the controller, but activating it with the avid software is extra ), and the Avid connection manager software. That software allows you to connect Mac or win computers to the server through a client. The drive volume and formatting seems to be handled by this Avid software, so you can't even see the large volume in Windows. Price of a similar server would be about $10K.

So if you have any Deathstar drives, you might want to change them.... FAST! Yes there is a class action against IBM for their Deathstars, if you do a google search, you'll find it.

Time to see if Avid will stand up and replace the other 15 as long as the data is all dead.

[rallynavvie]

IBM/Hitachi make good SCSI drives but I've only ever heard bad things about their IDE drives. I suppose that much disk space in SCSI would be a tad more expensive

So the array is just RAID 0? For that kind of cash I could have built one that could rebuild bad stripes on the fly. With how cheap used SCSI is maybe you can look at some U160 10k drives for a rackmount array. Hope you can get some cash for your troubles though.

[thayne]

4 out of the 4 deathstars I have bought in the last 2 years are dead... They suck!

[The village idiot]

Nope, not even raid 0, just one big virtual Avid special something volume set. We spent more than $50k on it and 10 more XpressDVpro dongles, and now they have lowered the educational prices. The new price is almost exactly one half the amount. Talk about pissed off when you see that 10 months later they cut the price in half. Somebody's got some splainin to do

I have a strange feeling that they will leave us High and Dry. And then that server will turn into a plain old win 2k machine with hardware raid (already in the cards), and we'll have our Macs log into Active Directory just like all of our audio workstations do. All our Macs will be on 10.3.x as soon as we get our copies of FinalCut and DVD Studio Pro when next years budget starts in a month or 2. Maybe we'll be teaching FCP sooner than we think. It is also now cheaper to buy a copy of XpressDVpro each year, than it is to pay for another year of support (at least of educators). I could rant for hours about Avid , but I'll stop now.

Oh yeah, the Hi-touch-me drives are warrantied for 3 years, and they are the exact same drive that IBM was selling, just a nice new sticker on the case. I wish we had the money to buy all new drives, at least then I would know that they will last through the fall semester without dumping all the students projects. How do you grade an assignment that wasn't finished but got dumped when you lose a drive. I wonder how 250GB drives would work in that machine, all 16 of them )I think these #ware cards have a 3TB volume size limit across both cards, 2 TB on one card). And yes we almost filled the 2.5 TB space after 2 semesters.

[pyrohydra]

Jesus christ, that's one ghetto setup you have (err, had )there. It is stupid to blame this on Hitachi/IBM. Run 16 drives, ESPECIALLY cheapo IDE drives constantly, chances are at least one will fail after a year. You really needed some fault tolerance there, buddy.

I guess you got what you paid for.

[The village idiot]

You really needed some fault tolerance there, buddy.

I guess you got what you paid for.

No shit, and didn't really get what we paid for, you can build the same spec server for only $10K not the $40K that thing cost.