It is. There are many clients (e.g. OEM's) that are using thouthands of
units of the same model.
curious that in this response you now step away from first hand
experience with a sample size of "thousands"
Wrong specifications, e.g. <1% failure/year
while failure rate is much higher, will cost them monney, enough monney
to get it back. I have seen wrong specifications of components and or
company has made serious claims because of wrong specifications.
Get it back? Good luck. How is an OEM supposed to "get it back" when
their system integration is even more likely to cause the warranty
claims than the disk manufacturer's product? You know how the
finger-pointing game is played in this business.
Furthermore a disk manufacturer's specified reliability stats are not
a promise or guarantee of performance that is legally binding or even
readily provable. MTBF, for example, does not even include the entire
population of drives, only an extrapolation/guestimate about the
population of _good_ drives over time (infant deaths are removed from
the pot). There's no escaping that's what MTBF is. So that's another
way it's very easy for an OEM to have a bad experience and at the same
time a disk manufacturer have a valid claim that their MTBF numbers
are appropriate.
Yes OEM's, etc keep reliability data & they're not going to disclose
this valuable private information & how they collect it, which might
step on the toes of other valuable relationships, in order to sue
Maxtor or Seagate because their specs were "false advertizing" and
Dell, for example, had to process more warranty claims than they were
hoping for & didn't like that they had to meet their obligations to
their customers & take responsibility for the product/package they
sold them. IMHO that makes no sense. A problem would have to be a
hell of a lot bigger than we're talking about here for anything that
remotely resembles that to happen.
Would an OEM change relationships based on their compiled reliability
data? Sometimes. But not because there is disagreement about the
numbers - that's simply a fact of life. An OEM would be incompetent
and destined for failure if they took advertized reliability stats as
literal, gospel truth. Instead switches come because losses were
unacceptable and out of step with the competition or simply that
someone else has a better deal or better marketable product that add
greater value to their packages.
