Does Apple use poor quality disks?

December 29, 2006 8:32 AM

Does Apple use poor quality disks? Does Apple's filesystem suck? How do you get a bad drive to give a smart error sooner?

Bought a 2nd MacBook, its drive "failed" within 2 months, just like the other one, which has had two drives fail, although the replacment lasted some time.

Only the first actually came grinding to a complete halt, the two later failures were simply of the form "erase & install", fill up drive, locate files which drive corrupts or reads slowely). Only the 3rd finally gave a smart error. The 2nd is still quite happy to run & corrupts files. But mostly 2 & 3 just read specific files extremely slowely (like 3 min for cat foo5167.txt).

fyi, I'm actually quite cautious about moving these machines before the sleep light has activated.

Apple charges more for their drives than PC laptop venders, so I'd kinda assume they oughta use good drives. But maybe not.

I've never seen this sort of difficulty with ext3 filesystems. Maybe Apple's files system is just really poor quality? Say via designe for backwards compatibility? Seems strongly suggested by the number of file recovery tool venders. Is it desirable to run a Mac on an ext3 partition? It seems pretty clear that ext3 has some mechanism for avoiding sectors it knows are bad while Apple writes over the same bad sectors again & again.

Anyone know if you can you get bad but unreporting drive to report a smart error sooner by running some sort of surface test or filling up the disk? Point being that they'll want to see the smart error before replacing the drive on warrenty.

posted by jeffburdges to technology (29 comments total)

Is it desirable to run a Mac on an ext3 partition?

Even if you could figure out how to do it, ext3 probably wouldn't support the mac-style resource forks.

Anyone know if you can you get bad but unreporting drive to report a smart error sooner by running some sort of surface test or filling up the disk? Point being that they'll want to see the smart error before replacing the drive on warrenty.

You should have received a hardware test disc with your mac, check to see if it has a test for the disk.

Does Apple use poor quality disks?

I havn't had any trouble with my apple-supplied hard drives, and none of my mac-using friends seem to have either. It is possible that apple received a batch of lower quality disks recently, but in general apple seems to use high quality parts.

Does Apple's filesystem suck?

no.
posted by b1tr0t at 8:40 AM on December 29, 2006

Confirmation Bias.
posted by damn dirty ape at 8:55 AM on December 29, 2006

On a trivia, knowledge-for-the-future note, Apple is supposedly going to offer support for the ZFS filesystem in Leopard, which offers a number of nice features, including checksums to indicate errors faster.

There's a fairly interesting writeup of the features at this blog
posted by Rictic at 8:56 AM on December 29, 2006

>Apple writes over the same bad sectors again & again.

HFS shouldnt do that, but in the long run it doesnt matter. One bad sector is one bad sector too many. If you detect one you should be backing up immediatly and replacing the drive immediatly. Expecting a filesystem to fix a hardware fault is silly and no vendor can do the impossible. Remapping a bad sector is a temporary fix at best.
posted by damn dirty ape at 8:59 AM on December 29, 2006

My Macbook's on its third hard drive as well. My instinct tells me that the size of the drives (tiny) combined with portability isn't a good mix. That said, mine has been installed on a desk for the past three months and still died.

I'm now at the point where I keep virtually nothing "local" on the laptop, it's all external.

(What's more, the battery locked itself out last week after being used fully and then not connected to power for a few hours -- a known fault that I didn't know about. Combine that with the poor-quality screen that has 1992-style colour ghosting and I'm done here. I'm all for cheaper Apple hardware, but this is taking the piss.)
posted by bonaldi at 9:11 AM on December 29, 2006

I've read more than once that Apple uses the Seagate Momentus drives, so they're not no-name drives at least.
posted by adamwolf at 10:13 AM on December 29, 2006

The MacBook Pro I'm typing on has a Fujitsu drive (120 gigs), and the other one on my desk has a Seagate Momentus- 100 gig.
posted by Steve3 at 10:38 AM on December 29, 2006

"Anyone know if you can you get bad but unreporting drive to report a smart error sooner by running some sort of surface test or filling up the disk?"

Download smartmontools. Build, run smartctl -a /dev/disk0 to get the SMART attributes and logs and smartctl -t long /dev/disk0 to start a long self test including surface scan.

If this goes over your head, here's a series of commands that should get you there:

curl http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/smartmontools/smartmontools-5.37.tar.gz |tar xzv
cd smartmontools-5.37 && ./configure --prefix=/opt/local && make -j3
./smartctl -t long /dev/disk0
./smartctl -a /dev/disk0

make install will install smartctl, smartd, and manpages to /opt/local - from there you can look into setting it up to run regular tests and monitoring for you.
posted by Freaky at 10:58 AM on December 29, 2006

Even if you could figure out how to do it, ext3 probably wouldn't support the mac-style resource forks.

Actually, the Mac will transparently use AppleDouble files to preserve resource forks and the like on filesystems that don't support HFS+ features, at some penalty in performance of course.

However, ext3 appears to support forks, so if a Mac could use it, it would probably work fine. (However, it is case-sensitive, which is less than optimal for Mac OS X applications.)
posted by kindall at 11:10 AM on December 29, 2006

Yes, they use low quality drives because they enjoy paying to replace everybody's. It makes them feel wanted.
posted by cillit bang at 11:26 AM on December 29, 2006

For those of us who are the Mac target demographic, simple SMART reporting and scheduled checks can be had here:

SMART Reporter.
posted by ikkyu2 at 2:58 PM on December 29, 2006

Yes, they use low quality drives because they enjoy paying to replace everybody's. It makes them feel wanted.

That was the only good bit about ordering my new battery -- knowing that it stung Apple cash. Aaaand then they tried to charge me $70 for calling tech support for warranty service, instead of going in person to an Authorised Reseller.
posted by bonaldi at 8:03 PM on December 29, 2006

Thanks kindall, I'm glad to know that I can use ext3 or ZFS if I ever find out that Apple's filesystem sucks. But no real word yet about Apple's filesystem itself.

Thanks Freaky, you may have just saved me a month of worry and two weeks without a computer when my next one fails.

ikkyu2, How is Smart Reporter diffrent from Disk Utility? In my experence, you usually know your drive is failing *before* the smart tells you, you'll find the drive taking a very long time to read serton files. If you even notice a suspecious spinning beach ball on a new mack, you should open Disk Utility immediately & verify the volume, if that test takes longer than expected, your drive will eventually fail.

bonaldi, Yes, Apple Care is basically a tech support scam masquarading as a warrenty. Any PC vender would give you *infinitely* better for $250. But I don't see a choice if you want any kind of warrenty past 1 year.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:04 AM on December 30, 2006

Thanks Rictic, ZFS sounds pretty impressive. But I find it extremely unprofessional that any filesystem would not checksum! Apple can get a pass with such unprofessional behavior, but I'm very surprised that ext3 does not have this feature.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:13 AM on December 30, 2006

At work I maintain hundreds of Apple laptops of various models, and have seen many, many more HD-related problems with the (approximately July 2006) MacBook Pros than with any previous model, regardless of age - and these are basically brand new. My guess is that Apple got stuck with a lot of flaky HD's in the first Intel production runs somehow. A few models ago, there were major issues with screens on a production run of Powerbooks - some bad parts get into their assembly line, and it takes a while before they get weeded out.
posted by sluggo at 9:28 AM on December 30, 2006

How is Smart Reporter different from Disk Utility?

Former sits in the background (menu bar) and performs a quick check every so often, alerting you if there's a problem. Disk Utility has to be run manually.
posted by ikkyu2 at 6:04 PM on December 30, 2006

I've been trying to explain this to people for weeks now, ZFS is not coming in Leopard. The screenshots you saw were fake. I talked to Apple's Developer Relations crew, and they said that the entirety of the ZFS rumor comes from one guy who works at Apple that posted to the ZFS mailing list to see if people might be interested. He is not working on it, he has other shit to do that is more important.

There is nobody at Apple working on it for 10.5.0. Time Machine has nothing to do with ZFS — it uses a new HFS+ feature for hard linking to directories, that's it.

ZFS is not magic. Don't treat it as such. OS X is not going to recognize ext3 either. It can mount and use UFS, but you do not want to use UFS. It isn't available in Disk Utility to format disks with in Leopard for a reason. The only filesystems you can or will be able to boot from are HFS in various form and UFS. Not even Solaris can boot from ZFS right now.
posted by blasdelf at 11:51 PM on December 30, 2006

To address your problems directly: you are having hardware issues, not filesystem issues.

Last september I had the hard drive in my Powerbook fail twice in two weeks – they replaced it and then the replacement failed. The second time I sent it in they replaced the logic board as well, and I never had an issue again. Sometimes (especially with rotational media) you get a string of bad luck and shit just fails. This fall I had six hard drives fail on me. SIX. I had four out of five hard drives fail in a three-drive RAID 5 array. Bad luck.
posted by blasdelf at 12:03 AM on December 31, 2006

Apple is also very careful to try to keep hard drive failure problems from becoming endemic during manufacturing. If you buy a Mac Pro or xServe with more than one hard drive, each one will come from a separate batch of the same model. That way all your drives don't fail at once if there were issues. They don't skimp.
posted by blasdelf at 12:07 AM on December 31, 2006

"Maybe Apple's files system is just really poor quality?"

I do not think that it is. We have many OS X boxes at work and many Linux boxes as well. Never had filesystem problems that you've described, and we've also had a very low failure rate on the laptops. We have a LOT of Macs, too. (And Sun boxes)

"Yes, Apple Care is basically a tech support scam masquarading as a warrenty. Any PC vender would give you *infinitely* better for $250"

I disagree with that. Even outside of work, I've always had excellent luck with Apple's warranty & AppleCare. Never had the same level of service from any PC vendor, although I have also been quite happy with Dell's service. We're paying Sun over $120,000 a year for their 4 hour support and ever since they moved a bunch of call center resources to some vendor in Canada, it's been a bitch. At least Apple has local folks that are allowed to actually work with you to solve the issues.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but my experiences have been pretty good.
posted by drstein at 6:23 PM on January 1, 2007

Oh, and to answer the question directly?

No, they do not use poor quality disks. They're using the exact same disks that would go into a Dell, HP, Gateway, Alienware, Lenovo/IBM, or any other portable computer.
posted by drstein at 6:25 PM on January 1, 2007

Thanks sluggo, I'll just hope the problems have worked themselves out when the new one gets in.

drstein, Yes, Apple Care is 110% a tech support scam: you are forced to buy tech support you don't need to get the extended warrenty you do need.

Apple Care is voided by ANY physical damage to the machine. A simillarly priced PC warrenty will not just fix unrelated electronics problems but actually cover repairs for user caused damage to the machine!

What the PC warrenty wont cover is software tech support. So, if you buy Apple Care, your being scammed into paying for people who need help configuring their mail reader & such.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:28 AM on January 2, 2007

jeffburdges: you're completely full of shit. But go on thinking that it's just a scam.

FYI, Dell's "total care" will not cover physically damaged machines either, even though they claim that it's supposed to. On the flip side, I had a user that dropped his PowerBook onto a concrete floor, and Apple repaired it under warranty.

Like I said, your mileage may vary. Obviously my experiences are drastically different than yours.
posted by drstein at 9:56 AM on January 2, 2007

drstein: he's not. It is scam-smelling, especially in the UK, where statutory rights say a product has to work for six years. Apple won't honour this, even under threat of legal action, without AppleCare. The Guardian has been hounding them about it for years.
posted by bonaldi at 9:59 AM on January 2, 2007

It is scam-smelling, especially in the UK, where statutory rights say a product has to work for six years. Apple won't honour this

That could be because it's not actually true. Six years is a maximum, not a minimum. The legal minimum is how long a product can reasonably be expected to work.
posted by cillit bang at 10:25 AM on January 2, 2007

especially in the UK, where statutory rights say a product has to work for six years.

Wow, that's even more absurd than the IRS former requirement that you deduct the cost of a business PC over a schedule of five years.
posted by b1tr0t at 10:25 AM on January 2, 2007

Yes, I'm handwaving slightly because I'm at work, cillit bang.

The long version is that Apple is hoist on it's own p, because by offering AppleCare for three years, they're saying that it can reasonably be expected to work for at least three years, but they don't offer the warranty that long.
posted by bonaldi at 11:05 AM on January 2, 2007

No, I've personally had Apple refuse to repair an obvious logic board fault due to one small unrelated dent in the case behind the screen; this machine was covered under AppleCare and I tried at three diffrent Apple Stores.

Such bullshit is standard operating procedure for Apple & you can see Apple Care repairs refused daily at any Apple Store. If your a major client, yes, the Apple Store guys obviously are given some flexibility. But most people never see their Apple Care again after they get one small dent.

Dell & others officially offer warrenty repair for accedental damage by the user. No doubt they make using it non-trivial. But people do get their accedental damage repaired all the time. And Dell sure as hell does not refuse unrelated repairs over small dents.

But my point is quite simple really: Apple is bundling tech support with their quite weak warrenty. Dell & others sells a much better warrenty without tech support for a simillar price. Such bundling of unnecissary tech support is a scam, period.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:02 AM on January 3, 2007

jeffburdges:

1. Learn to spell. If you find this unreasonable, spellcheck is available in Safari (and FF2).


2. You were probably being a dick to the Apple employee. I've had my Powerbook — which has tons of dents and actual corrosion on the aluminum casing — serviced twice under Applecare.

posted by blasdelf at 7:47 AM on January 5, 2007