WD Ae drive

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Putting aside my opinion of WD for a moment, who the hell is going to bother with a drive that might have 3% extra capacity after some kind of nebulous upgrade process?
 

Stereodude

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That's not what I got from the article. I got that the capacity of any given drive might not be the same depending on the yields, not that the drive might get larger with some update.
 

Bozo

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What I got was that a firmware update would increase the drives capacity. Sounds like an even faster way to loose all your data.
 

ddrueding

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I got that later drives with the same model number would have a slight increase in capacity over earlier models. I can only imagine implementations so huge that this would be a good thing.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Amazon's Cold Storage option? Backblaze? Facebook?
Are they actually going to pay extra for the possibility that those drives will have more storage in the future? Or are they just going to buy 8TB drives that they KNOW will have more storage?
 

ddrueding

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I was actually thinking of the automated deployment mode that can suck in drives of variable size and use all of the capacity of each effectively. ZFS?
 

Mercutio

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ZFS doesn't deal with size changes in array members very well as it is. These would exacerbate that problem.
 

LunarMist

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What I got was that a firmware update would increase the drives capacity. Sounds like an even faster way to loose all your data.

No, I don't think so. More likely is that the drive capacity may vary, i.e., yields of good sectors vary and drives are binned to different capacities.
Typically they would design the drive for a slightly higher capacity and hide the extra spare sectors for uniformity.
Over time and production technology improves the track or sector density may be increased slightly and new drives will retain the same model number.
 

sechs

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Why are people putting spinning disks in "cold" storage, instead of using tape?
 
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