EEVblog #927 - Jaycar Dumpster Sale

[Halcyon]

I find it hard to understand what benefit there could be for a HDD manufacturer to deliberately make a HDD that virtually builds in a weaker than normal bit errors correction. Why wouldn't a bit error that can be corrected not be corrected.

I could understand a drive spreading video over the entire set of cylinders or not stopping the motor to save startup wear or running the motor slower where higher rotation speed is not required. But not correcting errors? That sounds implausible.

Because it's cheaper both in terms of the few dollars they save in manufacturing costs and the time penalty it takes to attempt correction. Many modern drives have an error timeout of several seconds (from memory some WD or Seagate drives are factory set to 8 seconds). During that time, no other commands are processed until the one causing the error finishes (either by timing out or by successfully correcting the error and completing the command). Meanwhile, video data is still coming in and if you're talking about multiple video channels being recorded, that'll fill up the buffer fairly quickly.

For these sorts of applications losing an insignificant amount video data over many hours is quite acceptable. Who cares if over the course of 14 days the system looses a few frames or a few seconds of footage? Again, this is why they are used in these cheap off-the-shelf devices. It keeps costs down without really impacting too much on the overall reliability and design of the system.

Of course in a proper, large-scale CCTV installation (large venues, traffic monitoring centres etc...) you would have proper storage servers with proper enterprise drives.

[Brumby]

Probably there was enought UPS there to turn your house into an island operation... I would have loaded up all those in a heartbeat for 5 bucks.

They were all 'faulty' but the batteries in them are worth money. Even as scrap you might make a profit on them at those prices.

I grabbed 3 of the 1500VA units.  Nice and heavy - there's batteries in there!!

Will be looking at checking them out and see if they are serviceable.  If so, I might try them out on another UPS I have that is in need of batteries.

There's always the question of how well they might perform - but I'll do some testing before pressing them into service (if the exercise gets that far).

[Rasz]

You could just sell them and put the proceeds towards a 6TB drive.

very much this

as for the drives, those DVRs often use ATA security aka password protected firmware of the drive - it wont be detected in bios without that password, just like Xbox hdd. Seeing Dave rip the drives without checking first made me so hard.


This sale is the result of ridiculous money value in AU. Everything is so cheap compared to wages and local prices(utility/housing)  there is no financial incentive to repair.
In Poland smart local electronic retailers list all the RMAed stuff on web auctions, for example:  http://allegro.pl/listing/user/listing.php?us_id=39502583 (allegro = east European ebay, main advantage is no paypal, you pay with direct money transfers = no fees), broken crap sells at $5-30.

I really like this type of initiatives: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/09/23/2236230/from-bicycles-to-washing-machines-sweden-to-give-tax-breaks-for-repairs

[calexanian]

I wonder if those generators were two stroke and people did not put the oil in. Also how many people "Rented" them for a weekend camping trip and returned the "Broken" unit when they got home. They actually have a law against returning anything Gas powered here in California after you have put fuel in it. Everything past that point must be handled by the manufacturer and not the store because people were abusing return policies and for safety cause incompetent employees may spill the fuel which California has labeled as a carcinogen and therefore must be left outside. I always love to point out that they sell pre mixed two stroke fuel at hardware stores, but that is met by blank looks on clerks faces. 

[Fungus]

I find it hard to understand what benefit there could be for a HDD manufacturer to deliberately make a HDD that virtually builds in a weaker than normal bit errors correction. Why wouldn't a bit error that can be corrected not be corrected.

I could understand a drive spreading video over the entire set of cylinders or not stopping the motor to save startup wear or running the motor slower where higher rotation speed is not required. But not correcting errors? That sounds implausible.

Because it's cheaper both in terms of the few dollars they save in manufacturing costs and the time penalty it takes to attempt correction.

Complete bollocks.

Any of these drives could end up in the wrong place. No manufacturer is knowingly going to sell an unreliable-for-PC drive, it could cost them their business.

I don't know what the difference between these drives is, but if it's more than just marketing it will be in the seek times, spindle speeds, etc. It won't be in the reliability or amount of error correction.

eg. A DVR doesn't need the raw seek times of a PC, it could have a slower/quieter head positioning mechanism. A server drive might have extra heatsinking.

[tszaboo]

Probably there was enought UPS there to turn your house into an island operation... I would have loaded up all those in a heartbeat for 5 bucks.

They were all 'faulty' but the batteries in them are worth money. Even as scrap you might make a profit on them at those prices.

Yes. Even if some has faulty electronics, probably it is still stuffed with a big lead acid. If one electronics is good, you can snap a bunch of extra batteries from the other dead UPS to it, and get a longer lasting, same power output UPS (theory).

I grabbed 3 of the 1500VA units.  Nice and heavy - there's batteries in there!!

Good luck, let us know how it went!

[Halcyon]

I find it hard to understand what benefit there could be for a HDD manufacturer to deliberately make a HDD that virtually builds in a weaker than normal bit errors correction. Why wouldn't a bit error that can be corrected not be corrected.

I could understand a drive spreading video over the entire set of cylinders or not stopping the motor to save startup wear or running the motor slower where higher rotation speed is not required. But not correcting errors? That sounds implausible.

Because it's cheaper both in terms of the few dollars they save in manufacturing costs and the time penalty it takes to attempt correction.

Complete bollocks...

I don't know what the difference between these drives is...

Would you care to explain why you think it's complete bollocks (since you basically admitted in the same post that you don't know what the difference is)?

Perhaps my 17 years in IT may add a little weight to the discussion; and I don't just mean I answered IT helpdesk calls for the past 17 years, my expertise includes (among other things) server, NAS and SAN builds and administration for (at the time) one of Australia's top three largest telcos and forensic data recovery from both magnetic and solid state media (or course I'm not going to divulge what I did specifically, but for the purposes of this forum, consider me well versed).

Unless you believe the marketing wank, these drives are nothing special. If you have a look at the Western Digital AV-GP drives as an example, they are marketed as being "firmware optimised for write-intensive operations". In other words, it utilises the ATAPI Steaming Feature Set. First line straight out of the ATAPI documentation:

The Streaming feature set allows a host to request delivery of data within an allotted time, placing a priority on the time to transfer the data rather than the integrity of the data.

Specifically the sections we are interested in:

4.23.2.4 - The READ CONTINUOUS bit in the read stream commands (see 7.30.3.3) specifies that the device shall transfer the requested amount of data to the host within the time specified by the DEFAULT CCTL field (see 7.4.3.4) or the COMMAND CCTL field (see 7.30.3.2) even if an error occurs. The data sent to the host by the device in an error condition is vendor specific.

4.23.2.5 - The WRITE CONTINUOUS bit in the write stream commands (see 7.69.3.2) specifies that the device shall transfer the requested amount of data from the host within the time specified by the DEFAULT CCTL field (see 7.4.3.4) or the COMMAND CCTL field (see 7.30.3.2) even if an error occurs. If the device is unable to resolve an error within the time specified by the DEFAULT CCTL field or the COMMAND CCTL field, the erroneous section on the media may be unchanged or may contain undefined data. A future read of this area may not report an error, even though the data is erroneous.

As I said in my previous posts, if this sort of drive behaviour is something you don't care about (such as in the case of streaming video that isn't used for broadcasting or post-production purposes), then this drive might be quite alright. If you're thinking about storing anything critical on it, you run the risk of corrupted files.

You'll also note that in their specifications, their MTBF figures are quoted based on hard errors (which I think most manufacturers are). You could have endless amounts of soft errors that go uncorrected.

There is a reason why these drives are specifically targeted at low-end CCTV systems and consumer streaming NAS type devices.

It basically comes down to the old mantra: FAST, GOOD, CHEAP; Pick two.

[Rasz]

It won't be in the reliability or amount of error correction.

Complete bollocks. It most certainly will.
Strong error correction is not categorically a good thing to have. Market segmentation dictates the level you need. For PC use  you want as much as you can throw at the problem, 10 second complete system freeze while drive is clicking like mad is preferred over lost data. Enterprise raid environment on the other hand demands tightly controller timings, busy for too long will throw you out of the array as a faulty drive.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/other/2579-001098.pdf

[kalleboo]

In other words, it utilises the ATAPI Steaming Feature Set. First line straight out of the ATAPI documentation

Those are just extra features *it supports* if the application uses them. If you pop it in a PC it will use regular read/write commands and act like a normal drive with regular error recovery.

One area where there are important differences are "For RAID" drives (WD -RE), where they have a hard limit on error correction retries. You used to be able to enable/disable that behavior with a utility but they killed that.

[Fungus]

Would you care to explain why you think it's complete bollocks (since you basically admitted in the same post that you don't know what the difference is)?

I thought I had, but...

If you're thinking about storing anything critical on it, you run the risk of corrupted files.

This ^

Imagine a web site that says, "Warning: Some of our drives are unsuitable for use in desktop PCs, they might corrupt your data!!"

If that fits into your world-view then you're from a completely different planet.

But let's look at some drive brochures....

Here's two Samsung drive brochures for desktop + video drives:

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/support-content/samsung/internal-products/spinpoint-m-series/en-us/samsung-m9t-internal-ds.pdf

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/support-content/samsung/internal-products/spinpoint-m-series/en-us/docs/15SS443_US_Spinpoint%20M8_VIDEO.8.10.2015.pdf

Note that the reliability specifications are the same.

The noise/accoustics aren't. The max transfer rates aren't. The biggest difference I can see is in the "power-on-to-ready" time. One is measured in seconds and the other in milliseconds.

These are exactly the sort of differences I predicted without knowing a damn thing about the drives or having any experience in a PC support context.

Also, the 'video' drives have smaller capacity than the desktop drives.

So yeah, if you've heard anything regarding "reliabilty" it's probably just marketing wank to try and sell you a more expensive disk (I'm guessing the video drives are slightly cheaper because of the smaller capacity).

[Fungus]

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/other/2579-001098.pdf

Did you even read that? That's totally not applicable here.

Short version: In a RAID environment you don't need to halt the system and do an error recovery cycle when a disk sector read fails. You can log the event and return immediately because you have redundant data from the other disks. The bad sector can be rebuilt later from the other disks in the RAID.

[Halcyon]

Would you care to explain why you think it's complete bollocks (since you basically admitted in the same post that you don't know what the difference is)?

I thought I had, but...

If you're thinking about storing anything critical on it, you run the risk of corrupted files.

This ^

Imagine a web site that says, "Warning: Some of our drives are unsuitable for use in desktop PCs, they might corrupt your data!!"

If that fits into your world-view then you're from a completely different planet.

My world view is that manufacturers tend not to advertise their product's shortfalls in marketing material or their glossy brochures. I could be completely wrong there though? Maybe they are all up-front and honest.

Here's two Samsung drive brochures for desktop + video drives:

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/support-content/samsung/internal-products/spinpoint-m-series/en-us/samsung-m9t-internal-ds.pdf

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/support-content/samsung/internal-products/spinpoint-m-series/en-us/docs/15SS443_US_Spinpoint%20M8_VIDEO.8.10.2015.pdf

Note that the reliability specifications are the same.

Yes and measured in hard errors (hence the "Non-recoverable Read Error"). They mention nothing about soft or correctable errors.

I'm not sure what the argument is here? My entire point was that these "AV drives" are designed for a specific purpose, a purpose where data integrity doesn't matter all that much. Under the hood, they are mostly just a bog standard desktop drive with some tweaked firmware and maybe some hardware components missing (ECC circuitry, accelerometers etc...). Why on earth would someone (other than someone who didn't know what they were talking about) go out and buy a hard disk specifically designed for CCTV and streaming video applications and throw it in their regular desktop computer, or a server or install it in a laptop?

This is a great example of why there are so many "computer technicians" out there, but only a small fraction of them are actually great at their job.

Have you actually had a look at some of these cheap and nasty Chinese CCTV recorders? They are just awful bits of hardware. That's where these drives are great, they'll just write what it's told to write and read back whatever it reads back. Errors go unchecked and un-noticed (mostly) and probably a good thing too, some of the crap hardware would probably just lock up.

[ericloewe]

The noise/accoustics aren't. The max transfer rates aren't. The biggest difference I can see is in the "power-on-to-ready" time. One is measured in seconds and the other in milliseconds.

The 3.5ms spinup figure is pure bullshit. No drive spins up from 0 to 5400RPM in less than 4ms. Some marketing person accidentally added the m, most likely.

[rrinker]

 I've always wondered about those different drives - I have several AV-GP drives in my server, have for YEARS and never had had any issues. No SMART errors, nothing. It's on 24/7 and 5400 RPM is plenty fast enough to run multiple video streams from, so the reduced power is a handy feature. Now that they have further segmented the drive times to specifically call attention to the "surveillance" models, I don't buy those for the server. This server does not use any form of RAID so I don't want drives meant for RAID controllers. I have a mix of drives, the oldest ones are probably 4-5 years old now, the newest one I installed last year. As I run out of space I replace one of the smaller drives (still have a couple of 1TB models) with a new larger on (usually the second largest available, as the latest and greatest always commands a huge price premium - today the 4TB might be the better deal over a 6TB, for example).
 The only ones I'd think might have relaxed ECC code might be the newer Purple ones meant for surveillance video, since it really doesn't matter if there is some bit dropout. IF this is the case, I don't believe they did it with the previous models, or if they did, the effect is not nearly as bas as might be assumed.

[CJay]

I find it hard to understand what benefit there could be for a HDD manufacturer to deliberately make a HDD that virtually builds in a weaker than normal bit errors correction. Why wouldn't a bit error that can be corrected not be corrected.

I could understand a drive spreading video over the entire set of cylinders or not stopping the motor to save startup wear or running the motor slower where higher rotation speed is not required. But not correcting errors? That sounds implausible.

Because it's cheaper both in terms of the few dollars they save in manufacturing costs and the time penalty it takes to attempt correction.

Complete bollocks.

Any of these drives could end up in the wrong place. No manufacturer is knowingly going to sell an unreliable-for-PC drive, it could cost them their business.

I don't know what the difference between these drives is, but if it's more than just marketing it will be in the seek times, spindle speeds, etc. It won't be in the reliability or amount of error correction.

eg. A DVR doesn't need the raw seek times of a PC, it could have a slower/quieter head positioning mechanism. A server drive might have extra heatsinking.

Server or Enterprise class drives are rather different, often they are obviously mechanically different packages to the 'equivalent' desktop drives, things I've heard quoted are extra rigidity in the chassis for more accurate repeatable positioning of the heads, extra mass for more heat dissipation, they often use different platters (2.5" platters in a 3.5" form chassis for instance because they can be spun faster and seek times are lower because the heads have less distance to move, glass platters for better thermal stability and 'flatness' which I believe improves media reliability)

DVR drives often have different thermal recalibration profiles to desktop drives, different acoustic profiles, sometimes have different cache configurations and are 'guaranteed' to meet sustained transfer rates whereas desktop drives are all about the headline speeds because you might ask it to give you 1GB of data every twenty minutes but not expect it to write 16 streams of video 24x7.

My experience with DVR drives in CCTV tells me there are differences in desktop and DVR rated drives in terms of reliability and that was backed up by my wholesaler, he made the same markup on desktop and DVR drives but had way more returns of desktop drives (I did the occasional paid repair day for him, he eventually gave up offering 'budget' drives because they cost him more in the long run).

I'd have no problem using DVR drives in a RAID for my own use if I were using a hardware RAID controller, hell it's RAID and the controller deals with bad data, you're highly unlikely to lose data unless it's a gross failure across two or more drives (which I have seen, two 500GB drives failed within an hour of each other in a mirror set), but if I were speccing a storage array for a client I would most definitely spec server or enterprise class drives and stress the reasons for the choice to the client.

[boffin]

You want a Supermicro chasses to toss them into:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/2U/2027/SYS-2027R-WRF.cfm

If that's too expensive, find yourself a used 6-8x 2½" drive server on ebay, and run FreeNAS on that, something like this:
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/HP-Proliant-DL380-G5-2x-Intel-X5460-3-16Ghz-Quad-Core-32GB-Ram-3x-146GB-HDD-Serv-/201673138316?hash=item2ef4a7e08c:g:dp0AAOSwYIxX4aZe
(assuming it has the drive trays)

[Halcyon]

You want a Supermicro chasses to toss them into

  Can't go wrong with Supermicro gear. Highly recommend it! Not badly priced either compared to brand name server gear. I get my Supermicro parts from Alfa Computers over in Alexandria.

[Jeff_Birt]

What jumped out at me is that places such as Jaycar buy all this cheap crap from China, knowing a LARGE percentage will be DOA, because they know they can flog it on the public who salivates when thinking about all the cheap crap from China they can buy. The people buying it know its cheap crap that might not even last a year, but hey, it was CHEAP! In six months to a year they are back buying more cheap crap from China to replace the previous cheap crap they bought which has already died.

If you want to spend your money wisely it is hard to distinguish the cheap crap from quality products. Just because something is 10x the price does not automatically mean it is 10x as good. You might choose to spend a little more on the Sony TV vs. the Walmart brand guessing that it will last for 10+ years, not the perhaps 2 years of the cheap crap (if Sony did not use cheap One Hung Lo brand caps that is.)

When I grew up we did not have a lot of money but I can remember my Mom talking about spending money wisely, "Would you rather have more cheap junk or a few nice things?" I think for most of the world now the answer is more cheap things.

[ericloewe]

You want a Supermicro chasses to toss them into:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/2U/2027/SYS-2027R-WRF.cfm

If that's too expensive, find yourself a used 6-8x 2½" drive server on ebay, and run FreeNAS on that, something like this:
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/HP-Proliant-DL380-G5-2x-Intel-X5460-3-16Ghz-Quad-Core-32GB-Ram-3x-146GB-HDD-Serv-/201673138316?hash=item2ef4a7e08c:g:dp0AAOSwYIxX4aZe
(assuming it has the drive trays)

Ooof, that thing would be loud, power-hungry and seriously slow.

Anything older than Nehalem really has serious difficulties keeping up in modern environments. For FreeNAS, specifically, anything older than Nehalem is atrociously slow - not really because of the CPU core, but because of the FSB. Since everything had to be crammed through the FSB (unless it was in cache or registers), that thing became a massive bottleneck. It's even worse on the quad-cores, because they're two dual-cores in one package tied together with the FSB.

That said, one popular solution is to acquire an ancient server and throw everything but the chassis out - this works well with the Supermicro stuff because you can still get parts for many older models (or easily adapt parts from newer ones). The only major components that may need replacing are the SAS backplane, if it's an ancient SAS1 expander backplane, if drives larger than 2TB are to be used; and the power supplies - older PSUs were extremely loud, with proper fan control being a relatively recent feature.

[Alaskaal]

I don't think that I could have mustered the self-control to video as Dave did without dropping the camera, grabbing a cart, and stacking goodies on it. Those power supplies impressed me, even if they were crap. I would have grabbed the stack and used the cases for builds. Where else can you get a nice project case for $5.00, not to mention a dollar!

Wow! That was neat. We never get events like that in Alaska. The closest I come to it is trash day at the dump. Great video Dave!

[Brumby]

Dave must have had influence....  When I was there, the only things on offer for $1 were the turntables everything else was $5.

... but I did walk up to the register with 11 items and when I said "make it $50?" the guy said OK.  I was wearing my negative feedback T-shirt.  The guy that served me was in Dave's video at the Maker Faire.

[Rasz]

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/other/2579-001098.pdf

Did you even read that? That's totally not applicable here.

Short version: In a RAID environment you don't need to halt the system and do an error recovery cycle when a disk sector read fails. You can log the event and return immediately because you have redundant data from the other disks. The bad sector can be rebuilt later from the other disks in the RAID.

so you agree there are disks with different level of error correction and your previous post was _Complete bollocks_, yes?

[Baer]

Very cool video Dave, and nice score! Too bad they don't have too many of these sales around here, or at least I never get to hear about them. There is a definite urge to go to one and hard to resist my hoarder instinct.

As you did, I'd just harvest the good bits.... but then what to do with all the junk that's left over? You still have to now dump the case, boards, cables and everything else that you can't really use. It's worth it though given how cheap it all was. I would find it hard to resist bringing more stuff home.... And then the wife will kill me. 

    What bothers me to no end is my recent visit to BESTBUY.... and sometimes STAPLES. They have this area at the front of the store for recycling... where people bring their own e-Waste to recycle. Last time I was at BESTBUY they had a stack of stereos, laptops, phones, and I don't what else. That is like teasing an alcoholic with a bottle of vodka....   

I wanted so badly to see if I could "dumpster dive" into that area, as I was almost certain it wasn't complete garbage. It's just as you walk into the store. But I realize that it is stealing if you take it, just as much as curbside-grabs (without asking the home owner who dumped it) can also be an issue. Still, I know there are trucks going around the neighborhood on garbage days and loading up stuff.... Especially the more affluent areas of town, where people dump valuable stuff all the time.

BESTBUY and STAPLES are supposed to be giving this stuff to e-Recycling, but then again, how many of those minimum-wage paid kids in the store probably dive in there themselves as a fringe benefit of the working at the store? Are do they have a strict policy in place to not touch any of it? The e-Waste company also likely paid BestBuy or at least paid to install their e-Waster Recycling Box/Display in the front entrance, so they are looking to make some profit from whatever stuff they are scoring as well, in the used after-market or recycled materials. I'm sure they have a warehouse and staff that go through it all and decide where it should go to return the best profit as well.

Anyways, I'm in the Vaughan, Ontario (north of Toronto) area and so far I haven't heard of or been aware of any such warehouse sales or e-Waste recycling depots that let people go through and pick up stuff that they can re-purpose. I'm obviously not going to steal stuff from the recycle bins of BESTBUY and STAPLES, and I don't have or know of any e-Waste-rich dumpsters in my area. That's probably a good think... don't enable a hoarder...

The only thing that comes close are some surplus electronics stores, but they are fairly expensive or have old junk and obviously need to pay to keep the place open.  Still... It would be nice to know for example, if anyone has any old laptops that I can wipe them clean and give them to my local kids school as they are always looking to equip the classes (they are under 10 years old, grades 1-5 primary).

the big problen, atleast with the Canadian stores, is once the e stuff  goes in the boxs or in the area. You cant touch it. looking for some 18650s to recycle from laptop batteries . I went to the local staples and asked.  " Nope, once the batteries are in the boxes we legally cant do anything with them. Its the same at other collect points ,for E waste. It not like Iam going to do anything illegal  with the stuff I just like to see what make tech tick

[Brumby]

I am sorry I didn't go earlier in the day.

There was one thing I was tempted by - and I would have liked to have picked up a couple.  These were the powered speakers.

When I got there, I saw someone pushing out a trolley with several - so I thought there were still some left.  I hunted around, not having much luck and was thinking about settling for a couple of those little cube units people use for busking.  But, hiding down the back in among a scattered mess I found one in it's box - only one.  It had a broken side handle, but otherwise seemed quite reasonable.

Still checking it out, but the major functions I would use seem perfect.  Best $5 I've ever spent.

[Vgkid]

That was a neat watch, wish we had something similiar around here. Would have easily grabbed a few of those UPS's.