Mac guys

[iaresee]

Is the mini ever going to get a refresh/update? It is kinda due - I hope Apple haven't decided to abandon it.

Rumours say this fall. But honestly, judging by what Apple has been doing to all the products on the refreshes, I'm kind of hoping they leave it alone. Each refresh is reducing the user-serviceable parts in their machines. The latest rMBPs are essentially un-serviceable by the average joe thanks to all the critical bits being SMD and soldered down now. Only the largest iMacs can have their RAM changed now. Pity.

 

[plexi59]

This is not completely true. The Reds run a different firmware than the Green drives that keeps them from spinning down so aggressively and have better control over spin rate. They also get a better warranty, something that comes about from better part binning. The Red drive firmware supports time-limited error recovery but it kicks in in the multiple second range and shouldn't be a problem in a single drive setup. If your sectors are that damaged you're fucked any way.

Spin-down time is adjustable on any drive by passing through a few commands. Moreover, if you run Windows or OS X, it's not the drive that controls the spin down, it's the OS. That's how you can disable spin down entirely through a checkbox in System Settings. Regarding damaged sectors, it is often the case that the drive can read them, just not on the first try, similarly to how a CD drive sometimes can read a scratched CD. If that happens, the drive will re-allocate those sectors to a reserved area on the disk. Modern drives (non-NAS ones anyway) have quite a bit of space reserved for this purpose. SSDs do this, too, except there wear and tear is expected, so it caught early before it causes any problems, and remapped more aggressively.

 

[iaresee]

Spin-down time is adjustable on any drive by passing through a few commands. Moreover, if you run Windows or OS X, it's not the drive that controls the spin down, it's the OS. That's how you can disable spin down entirely through a checkbox in System Settings.

Close but not quite accurate. The OS sends the signal to spin down (and spin up) but the drive's firmware controls the actual deceleration and acceleration curves and the head parking behaviour. In the case of the red vs. green drives, they're tuned to spin up much quicker and heads are parked far less agressively than the greens to reduce time-to-on latency.

See: AnandTech | Western Digital Red Review: Are NAS-optimized HDDs Worth the Premium?

Regarding damaged sectors, it is often the case that the drive can read them, just not on the first try, similarly to how a CD drive sometimes can read a scratched CD. If that happens, the drive will re-allocate those sectors to a reserved area on the disk. Modern drives (non-NAS ones anyway) have quite a bit of space reserved for this purpose. SSDs do this, too, except there wear and tear is expected, so it caught early before it causes any problems, and remapped more aggressively.

The reds are no different in this regard, they just have additional firmware support for TLER if your controller wants to limit how long the drive will spend trying to repair and recover damaged sectors. The greens don't allow for this and will stall indefinitely on an un-repairable area. OS X shouldn't set TLER by default on the drive running in single drive mode. I'll check later this week when I can finally get around to powering on my iMac...