You Missed It, SatelliteGuys Get Together with Charlie Ergen

[LER]

I'm dying to know myself. I've been on pins and needles all night! C'mon Scott....you're killing us!

The info has been in the pub since yesterday. If you want to get the best information FIRST, join the pub.

 

[Poke]

Well man looks like everyone had fun and it seems allot of great news came out of the show this year. It seems 2008 will be a interesting year thats for sure.

 

[mdwatt]

The info has been in the pub since yesterday. If you want to get the best information FIRST, join the pub.

Great. Will do! Thanks.

 

[lwlt06]

Great trip! Late review.

The Dallas meeting was definitely worth the trip. After the informative q&a session with Charlie in the meeting room, the tour of Dish equipment on the show floor with Leslie turned out second to none. If getting a glimpse of current and near future Dish electronics was eye candy, I believe that the group as a whole got their fill.

Charlie sounded firmly determined to keep the company on top of the game. After seeing the spectrum of coming equipment and viewing the various user menus and screen shots, I agree. It's hard to imagine D* getting even close.

Hats off to Scott, PG and others involved for arranging this unique opportunity.

 

[Smith P.]

Yes they are calling it the 622HZ.

So, your prognosis was right, regardless that frustration point .


It could be good sign of opening the platform for third companies ( like AT&T now - well, lets see who is CONTRACTING for AT&T there );
should I say OpenSource for embedded DishLinux is coming? :

 

[Jimmy J]

Alright....it's Monday. Where and whats the scoop Scott???:

 

[LER]

Alright....it's Monday. Where and whats the scoop Scott???:

read the front page (http://www.satelliteguys.us)

LER

 

[jcrash]

It is true that a standard PC hard drive is spec'ed for a 50% duty cycle. When run at 100%, it can lower the mean time between failures to just 25%-33% of spec.

For a 100% duty cycle application, one should use a drive that was designed to be used in a server.

If the DVR doesn't do anything to wake up that external drive, then one that powers down when there is no activity should be fine. As most of the time, it would be off. But if the DVR pings it once in a while, then it will sit out there spinning.

Recent studies have shown there is no difference in real MTBF for Server versus consumer drives. These studies had tens of thousands of drives involved, so I would believe them over a few engineers assertions.

 

[Smith P.]

Please share with us your source of the studies.
As en engineer I can tell you difference between start-stop mode with poor cooling and constant rotation in chill server room. MTBF will be different.
As SAdmin and DT III level support I know this from my 20+ practice.

 

[mike123abc]

Google recently reported on their drive experience. As shown over their thousands of hard disk drives. Operating temperature did not have an effect on the drive, or the activity level. http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

In general the age of the hard drive was the largest factor in its probability of failure.

 

[jcrash]

Please share with us your source of the studies.
As en engineer I can tell you difference between start-stop mode with poor cooling and constant rotation in chill server room. MTBF will be different.
As SAdmin and DT III level support I know this from my 20+ practice.

Even more data here from another study:

Summary

Full Study

High-end “enterprise” drives versus “consumer” drives?

Interestingly, we observe little difference in replacement rates between SCSI, FC and SATA drives, potentially an indication that disk-independent factors, such as operating conditions, affect replacement rates more than component specific factors.”

Maybe consumer stuff gets kicked around more. Who knows?

Infant mortality?

. . . failure rate is not constant with age, and that, rather than a significant infant mortality effect, we see a significant early onset of wear-out degradation.

Dr. Schroeder didn’t see infant mortality - neither did Google - and she also found that drives just wear out steadily.

Vendor MTBF reliability?

While the datasheet AFRs are between 0.58% and 0.88%, the observed ARRs range from 0.5% to as high as 13.5%. That is, the observed ARRs by dataset and type, are by up to a factor of 15 higher than datasheet AFRs. Most commonly, the observed ARR values are in the 3%range.

Actual MTBFs?

The weighted average ARR was 3.4 times larger than 0.88%, corresponding to a datasheet MTTF of 1,000,000 hours.”

In other words, that 1 million hour MTBF is really about 300,000 hours - about what consumer drives are spec’d at.

Drive reliability after burn-in?

Contrary to common and proposed models, hard drive replacement rates do not enter steady state after the first year of operation. Instead replacement rates seem to steadily increase over time.

 

[Smith P.]

Slow down ppl - those stadies was about disks in SERVER environment.

Big difference if you will come to desktop ( not mention notebooks ) and PVR/DVR.

 

[jcrash]

Ah, but we aren't discussing the environment. We are discussing the type of drive, correct? Regardless, the temperature of the drive was less correlated than the length of service in drive failure.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Folks this is a discussion about out party, not how many RPMS it takes with the Earth current rotation to kill a consumer hard drive.

Again my thanks to Charlie Ergen and Eric Sahl for spending over an hour with us on Saturday. We did something really special and it was a proud moment for SatelliteGuys.