Teo Zenios wrote: Any how many hard drive companies are actually making a profit moving those 376 Million units? I don't expect blueprints and electrical schematics with the electronics I buy. But I do expect some way of finding out if the hardware is actually broken or something else (software, bad inputs etc) is causing things to not work. What percentage of returned electronics are sent back 100% working because people didn't have a good way to troubleshoot what the real problem was in the system? TZ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Billy: I believe that there are six major companies still doing disk drives: Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu, WD and Samsung. Seagate is doing great, WD about half of Seagate's profit. Samsung, and Fujitsu are profitable. Toshiba, probably not and Hitachi definitely not. If you are looking into testing units, look for the SMART attributes. Most modern drives do elaborate error monitoring and logging. These values are available to the user by reading out the SMART logs. Some OS's do this as a matter of course and even present error messages when a drive is starting to fail. Finally, recent drives usually have Drive Self Test capability if you want to invoke diagnostics. The ARM cores used have tremendous potential and power. An ARM- 9 processor at 400 MHz is far more powerful than any of the supercomputers I worked on. And they reserve10-20GBs for maintenance use - many times more drive capacity than any of the supercomputers I used to maintain. No Fault Found on returns can vary from 20 to 50%. That is the same ratio it was 30 years ago. And not surprisingly, it is the same ratio for Optical drives, game machines, printers, etc. It is not so much not able to troubleshoot as the fact that when a system goes in for repair, they usually swap out a hard drive. When that doesn't fix the issue, the techs don't put the original drive back. On all electronics, there are many user influenced errors that can never be reproduced. Static is one; power failures, partially plugged in sockets, shock, vibration from the environment, noisy AC power, and on and on. There are a large number of external conditions that can cause equipment failure. If you are not there, you don't know what the conditions are. Of course there is the other extreme. I worked on a computer once that the building contractor had tied the lightning rod to the grounding plane of the computer room. Every single PCB in the system was fried. I saw an IPod recently that had been run over by a bull dozer. We often get calls about recovering data from laptops dropped into a lake or the ocean. I have the case of an XBox that had been hit with a sledge hammer by a frustrated wife. Optical is usually sent in for foreign material in the disk tray. On the game machines that I gathered stats on, the number one failure was 2 or more CDs. The users thought they could stack up games like a phonograph. And I thought finding pizza in a DVD was bizarre until I checked the logs and found we averaged one of two a week. I guess a game system is warm and lends itself to being an oven. Billy