That depends on the degree of hardening. It is not black and white. You are never going to make it 100% impervious.

You most certainly can. There are some simple fixes that can make a big difference.

Once you detect an error, you can often fix it. You can re-run a calculation, or reload a program from flash, or whatever.

With current technology, it is common for even stock chips to have some rad-hard features. For instance, many ICs are manufactured with depleted boron as a semiconductor dopant and in the borophosphosilicate glass insulating layer. This can dramatically reduce the number of soft errors, and adds little to the cost, since depleted boron is not particularly expensive, and only small quantities are needed. It is also possible to fix some problems in software, by running periodic checksums on blocks of memory.

I don't think that is what they are saying. I have kids in elementary school, and I volunteer to help out in class and in an after-school programming and robotics program. There are HUGE differences in ability between kids, and dumping them all into one class doesn't make much sense. A typical Chinese-American boy is going to be lightyears ahead of a typical Latino girl. If you direct instruction toward the smart kids, the dumb kids will be lost. If you focus on the dumb kids, the smart kids will be bored, and will ridicule the dumb kids. We ended up doing what Google suggests: We moved the smart kids to a separate classroom where they work on self-directed projects with adult intervention only when they get stuck, while the dumb kids work in a more traditional lecture style class. Nobody is excluded, and kids are segregated by ability, not ethnicity or gender.

Unfortunately, I have found that the dumb kids tend to stay dumb, while the smart kids leap even further ahead .... I don't have a solution for that.

Can you back up your otherwise meaningless opinion with any actual data?

But why would Harrison Ford exaggerate the quality of the script? Sure, he has a stake in the financial success of the film, but nobody in Hollywood is going to prostitute their integrity just for the sake of money, and an occasional Oscar. I think you can just take his word for it.

Thanks for your unsupported and unsubstantiated opinion. All the actual data says otherwise. If "enterprise" drives were actually more reliable, you would see them used in datacenters by companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. But all of these companies use "consumer" drives in their datacenters. So does everyone else that believes data over marketing.

Except that the referenced study shows that consumer drives are just as reliable as "enterprise" drives WHEN USED IN A DATACENTER. Nothing that you mention explains that.

I think this is BS. The marginal cost of "better electronics" is pennies. The marginal cost of "better firmware" is zero. So you are basically saying that manufacturers intentionally create defective products. In a competitive market (and the HDD market is very competitive) there is no reason they would do that.

If they actually did that, it would show up in reliability tests, rather than just in the totally made up MTBF figures printed on the box.

Also, they don't need to. They can just tell people that the enterprise drives are better, and plenty of idiots will believe them, in the face of contrary evidence, and even come up with conspiracy theories to justify their irrational choices. There is a sucker born every minute.

Why would the interface change the reliability of the HDD?

Agreed. The price is also different.

For reliability, I prefer actual data over your anecdotal opinion: Consumer drives shown to be more reliable than enterprise drives.

There is no difference in reliability between "enterprise" and "consumer" drives. Those are purely marketing terms. The sole advantage of enterprise drives is a longer warranty. If you are bad at math, you might think that is a good deal.

Sony Pictures is a subsidiary of Sony. It is part of the same organization.

They had a big breach in 2011. They had other smaller breaches as well.

Duh. Thanks for your brilliant hindsight.

It doesn't guarantee future performance, but it certainly indicates it. In general, past performance is the best indicator of future performance.

My daughter uses mine to make furniture for her dollhouse.