Re: [tlug] HDD Reliability

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

>You are joking aren't you?
>http://www.goldengate.net/~dlpeters/IBMSucks/
>
>The class action lawsuit.
>http://www.sheller.com/Practice.asp?PracticeID=114
>
>Time for a new drive
>
Oh great... that WAS the new drive!  One ray of hope - it's a 120GB and 
the article only mentions smaller sizes - 15-76.   Actually, it gets 
worse for me though - I have three IBM drives - an 80GB and two 120GBs.  
Both of the 120GBs make that weird sporadic electronic noise... and now 
after reading that chilling history, I'm even more worried - well, I 
suppose - even if they are all at risk, they won't all bite the dust on 
the same day, so as long as I keep important data on at least two of 
them....  In one sense - it's a logical turn of events.  I once bought 
an old, huge, and breath-takingly heavy 40MB (yes, that's an "M", not a 
"G") drive for Y100 at a used place in Akihabara - just to tear it apart 
and see how it was put together.  What struck me is that the heads on 
the pick-up arms were HUGE!!  And the four platters (10MB each it would 
seem) were replaceable!  Six screws can be removed and then the disks 
(with spacers between each one) can be removed and easily reassembled 
(the cluster is sitting on my desk as a paperweight).  Contrast that 
with new drives that are functioning with very tiny heads, and 
manufactured with razer thin margins.  And - folks in TLUG - this is one 
of the things that infuriates me about the big bloody M - while those... 
those... *******'s are raking in money hand over fist, the hardware 
manufacturers have been hurting.  There is definitely not a fair 
allocation of money flowing from consumers to the people who put 
computer's together.  I will be as unhappy as anyone if my drive packs 
it in, but actually - imagining ever tighter tolerances within the 
drives, combined with ever thinner profit margins for the companies 
manufacturing them - I have been expecting something to start slipping.....