Re: [tlug] HDD Reliability

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Tod" == Tod McQuillin <devin@example.com> writes:

    Tod> On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Ben Konrath wrote:

    >> Which drives are supposed to be good?

    Tod> I've also had really good luck with Seagate drives.  The
    Tod> latest offerings use fluid bearings and are dead quiet too.

My experience with Seagate drives is that they fail on the purchase
anniversary + 1 day or so.  YMOV, but one Seagate is the only drive
that managed to cost me data I cared about yet (email that arrived
between backups).

My feeling is that it's not the company, it's the model (and of course
the luck!)  I'm just before losing a 4-year-old IBM drive (actually, I
just decommissioned it _before_ it totally crashed), and the other one
I bought at the same time is making noise, too.  And I've got other
IBM drives that have gone for 5 or 6 years and still going strong
AFAICT.  I've got one (in my notebook) that only lasted about 18
months.

On the other hand, there was the Micropolis drive that stretched a
1-year warranty into nearly 2.5 years: crashed after 6 months, they
sent me a new one and extended the warranty for a full year from them
receiving the old drive, then they did the same thing again 9 months
later.  Then they went under about the time I lost the the third drive
(which had become purely a scratch disk, of course).  I guess they had
so much trouble getting rid of them in the store that they didn't mind
sending them out as warranty replacements.  :-)

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