[nylug-talk] Paper IT certs and disk drive fabrication differences -- WAS: Slim home server

[Gregg Levine]

(See below. Google mail on Firefox on Slackware Linux.)

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 10:49 PM, Michael Bacarella
<michael.bacarella at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry about the top-posting.  Gmail on BB sucks (I can't even edit the
> quoted message to trim it).
>
> What qualifies as a non-degreed engineer?  Can a high school dropout
> with a number of years of field experience take an exam to be a PE?
>
> What's the closest one to "software engineering?" ;-)
>
>
>
> On 5/21/08, Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org> wrote:
>> On Sat, 2008-05-17 at 18:49 -0400, Chris Knadle wrote:
>>> I got an ASEE, then an ASCS [associates in Computer Science], tried being
>>> a
>>> stockbroker, then after that brief dissappointing job went back to school
>>> for
>>> a BSEE in "Computer Engineering", which essentially just confuses
>>> everybody
>>> as to what it is.  It definitely relates to network administration because
>>> of
>>> the elective classes I've taken.  And after all that I'm still trying to
>>> figure out what I want to do "when I grow up".  ;-)
>>
>> Education doesn't define a person.  Heck, for anyone with 12-16+ years
>> of technical experience, the "theory" becomes obvious -- even
>> differential and integral calculus and basic transforms.  The 4-5 years
>> of "theory" is basically just a juggernaught of "commonality" and
>> "lessons learned," and that's why you forget 90% of it.  Because it's
>> far more retained when you apply it.  ;)
>>
>> That's why most State Board of Professional Engineers (BoPEs) allow even
>> non-degreed engineers to become PEs, at least in the US (can't say with
>> regards to Canada's equivalent), after 12-16+ years experience.  You
>> still have to sit the same exams, and the Fundamentals exam may present
>> some difficulty without more "academic" study.  But it's still quite
>> doable for someone without an ABET accredited BSE to get their PE before
>> 35.
>>
>>> In the job interviews I've gone on so far, my degrees generally don't get
>>> discussed and occasionally I wonder if they're even considered.
>>
>> They _never_ get discussed with the actual technical managers and staff.
>> They could care less.  I could care less when I'm hiring as well.
>>
>> But the HR and procurement departments seem to care.  It's not only why
>> the best employees "never get an interview," but even "get lost in the
>> process" after an interview.
>>
>> I've been dropped from consideration more than once because I didn't
>> have a CS degree.  I've even had one case where they said they needed a
>> "BS in Computer Engineering" verbatim, and they marked me down as an EE
>> without the Computer Engineering option (which I have).
>>
>> I've learned to send just the right info and, sadly enough, 'tude
>> towards the HR departments to get them to realize they are f'ing up,
>> legally.  Not only for myself, but when I'm trying to hire someone.
>>
>>>   Uh, well, er...  I don't understand what you're asking.
>>
>> You said "kind of drive" (sorry, I regurgitated "type" meaning your word
>> "kind").
>>
>>> You're comparing "enterprise" vs "comodity" drives, and everything
>>> I've used AFAIK has been "commodity", so I can only compare
>>> manufacturers or the interface type: 50-pin or 68-pin SCSI, IDE, SATA.
>>
>> Neither of which has any influence over reliability.  ;)
>>
>> Today, vendors outsource left and right.  IBM partnering with Hitachi
>> before selling out-right.  Western Digital to Hitachi and Quantum
>> (including after Maxtor bought them).  And Seagate finally starting
>> outsourcing heavily to Maxtor, although serious drops in QA caused them
>> to buy Maxtor.
>>
>> [ Boeing has run into the same issue first-hand on the 787 Dreamliner.
>> And they ended up buying some of the same companies too, especially
>> given the "just in time" manufacturing cost savings can cost time. ;) ]
>>
>> The only thing you can do is ...
>>   1)  Find out the model, and how it's fabbed, and
>>   2)  Read up on first-hand results with the model
>>
>>>   And I think all of the drives were
>>> 7200 RPM.  There might have been one set of SCSI drives in a mail server
>>> that
>>> were 10k RPM -- not sure.
>>
>> Anything 10,000rpm should be 292GB or less.  I could be wrong though.
>> Those are of smaller, reduced density platters, and higher costing
>> materials.
>>
>>> Oddly enough -- no.  Most of the servers I personally helped purchase were
>>>
>>> from vendors that allowed specifying hardware choices.  If standard
>>> servers
>>> from HP or others were purchased it just so happened that the hardware
>>> wasn't
>>> used on projects I worked on.
>>
>> Okay.  So you really haven't.
>>
>> Understand the whole certification and sample QA on commodity disks --
>> near-line/enterprise/RAID/etc... OEM versus consumer/desktop OEM/retail
>> is for cost reasons.
>>
>> If Hitachi, Seagate or Western Digital can sample a lot, and determine
>> the drives have reduced vibration and better operational tolerances.
>> Doesn't mean they are not going to fail.  It just means over the lot,
>> there are less failures.  So when you install dozens in systems, and
>> Tier-1 OEMs like Dell, HP, IBM, etc... sell hundreds of the drives in
>> dozens of the servers to a single customer, less failures are occurring.
>>
>> Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital are not going to warranty disks
>> that Dell, HP, IBM, etc... sell in systems that are running 24x7 and are
>> not of these samples.  Again, anyone who has been a product manager will
>> instantly see the cost differentiation en masse.  They are also far less
>> likely to warranty or even charge you a fee if you are sending _many_
>> consumer rated discs back to them and the SMART data is coming back as
>> operating 24x7, or has other operational data that is well outside
>> general, consumer usage.  Not one or two-off, but when you end up
>> sending dozens.
>>
>> That's why the sampling and QA differ.  There is also some added
>> firmware that vendors like Western Digital do on buffer flushing on
>> their Caviar RE that should only be done on 0 Wait State Caching SRAM
>> (capacitor-backed) or buffering DRAM (battery-backed) storage
>> controllers.
>>
>>> Yeah, friends have run into reliability issues on drives that were found
>>> to
>>> be related to driver firmware.  That's definitely an interesting area.
>>
>> That's more ATA issues.  The ATA spec is a PITA, and vendors don't
>> follow it, making it worse.
>>
>> ATA is nothing more than dumb traces with two end-points.  Integrated
>> Drive Electronics (IDE) on the drive, using Direct Memory Access (DMA)
>> mechanisms of the peripheral bus to the system memory.  In between is
>> the bus arbitrator, which not only needs its registers to be setup
>> proper in the firmware of the system, but handled correctly in the OS
>> driver.  Those two things along often conflict, even before we get to
>> the system firmware/OS driver v. IDE firmware issues.
>>
>> The only thing ATA was never, ever designed to do is handle DMA with
>> more than one end-point -- i.e., master/slave.  The one thing they did
>> right with SATA is not even offer it (finally).  The whole master/slave
>> is a left over from the Western Digital trademarked Enhanced IDE (EIDE)
>> specification, and it was never supported proper in the ATA spec (only
>> recognized for legacy compatibility), and definitely not well considered
>> when UltraDMA was offered with DDR and, later, QDR signaling, or CRC
>> checking for that matter.
>>
>> Native Command Queuing (NCQ) has been the latest, horrendous mess.  In
>> reality, using an intelligent ATA hardware storage controller (many do
>> SAS as well, since SAS is backward compatible with SATA) removes most of
>> the bonuses for NCQ.  Many of those cards will also shut down the
>> point-to-point NCQ of the ATA bus when they start having issues.  The OS
>> never sees it, because the intelligent controller is handling the
>> transfers.  It's actually triple over nice because the intelligent ATA
>> controller is 1) system memory, 2) bus arbitrator and 3) embedded
>> OS/driver in one -- so it removes a lot of factors.
>>
>> But that's another tangent.  ;)
>>
>>> Huh; the latest drives I've been purchasing were in the Seagate Barracuda
>>> 7200.10 series.  I had not known the were related to the Maxtor line
>>> before
>>> buying them.  They've been fine so far.
>>
>> The Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 line (187GB/platter flagship,
>> 250GB/platter in 250GB form) is probably their best model since the
>> 7200.7 (100MB/platter flagship).  The Maxtor drives of the same capacity
>> are actually fabbed as 7200.10 drives by Seagate, under their QA
>> control.  ;)
>>
>> The new 7200.11 line (250GB/platter flagship, 320GB/platter in 320GB
>> form) is having serious issues with firmware.  It's something to be
>> avoided right now until the kinks are worked out.  Seagate isn't the
>> only one having issues, Hitachi and Western Digital are as well.
>>
>>>    Last I worked directly for an I.T. department at a company they
>>> considered
>>> all hard disks to be equal (obviously a simplistic conclusion) and had no
>>> interest in having anyone research drive relibility, method of
>>> manufacture,
>>> etc.  "Just get the box a disk" was essentially the bottom line.  [I would
>>>
>>> have much prefered more design thought to go into hardware purchases, but
>>> hardware purchases were usually done in a rush for several reasons.  :-(]
>>>    And since then I still use commodity hardware for stuff I build for
>>> myself,
>>> and if I work on client's servers I don't carefully examine what type of
>>> drive a box has -- I haven't been asked to examine that.  Etc.
>>
>> My life is heavily CYA, especially since I work for a vendor myself.
>>
>> I have more recently been in the middle of an Intel debacle, and their
>> utterly lack of full disclosure (even to us vendors under NDA) with
>> regardless to Machine Check Exception (MCE) issues -- specifically, as
>> you can find in public documentation now -- the TLB.  Yes, TLB.  AMD
>> isn't alone.  ;)
>>
>> Made me completely appreciate AMD's decision to withhold their Processor
>> 10h (Barcelona) Stepping B2 multi-socket (Opteron) processors until they
>> worked out all the TLB issues on the B3.  Intel shipped G0 steppings on
>> not just their uni-socket Core 2s, but their multi-socket Xeons.  I was
>> hitting the Intel microcode dat file for Linux weekly for some time
>> there.  ;)
>>
>> Can't say more than is public, being under NDA and all.
>>
>> Likewise, because SAS is the mature SCSI-2 protocol using the same SATA
>> PHY (although externally SAS is a crapload better, mechanical/electrical
>> than eSATA, but that's another story), a lot of enterprise go the SAS
>> route instead of SATA when they hit non-commodity material/fabbed
>> 10-15,000rpm drives.  After all, the cost of the added SAS firmware
>> isn't the biggest cost, but the materials/fab required for the spindle
>> of the drive.
>>
>> But SAS, just like SCSI or FC, has nothing to do with the reliability of
>> the drive mechanics itself.  It's more of the non-commodity pairing of
>> cost in fab with cost in firmware.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Bryan J  Smith              Professional, Technical Annoyance
>> mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith

Hello!
I'll second that with, "Can a hobbyist who's got an associates degree
in repairing the things, plus well over at least twenty years
experience, plus about one to two years internship in the field get
one as well?".

Just thought I'd add to the controversy swirling around on this subject.

And Mike don't worry about your BB's explorations into the Mobil World
of Google Mail, it happens to everyone who dove into that rabbit hole.
-- 
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature was once found posting rude
 messages in English in the Moscow subway."