Re: [tlug] Seagate Sudden Death....

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

Botond Botyanszki wrote:

>>>[LHS] And - other Seagate hard drive users out there - have you had any
>>>trouble with your drives?
>>>      
>>>
>>[Josh] Sure. Hard drives eventually fail, regardless of the manufacturer or
>>model. This is just a fact of life, which is why some sort of backup
>>regimen (I recommend rdiff-backup[1]) is *extremely* important.
>>    
>>
>
>I had a 60 GB Seagate fail after 2 months of purchase. On the other hand,
>the infamous IBM deathstar in my desktop is still doing well after 4 years
>of heavy service.
>Most people have realized that the failure rate of HDDs has increased.
>Though lately, manufacturers are trying to fool you with 2 or 3 years of
>warranty instead of one yaer. I'm not saying that's bad, but you won't get
>back what you had on your failed disk, just an empty replacement for free.
>This is why raid plus backup is more important.
>

I think the dual pressure of ever tinier heads to pack in more data on 
the same sized platters and very low profit margins for the 
manufacturers is bound to affect long-term reliability.  What upsets me 
a little this time, is that there was no warning beyond one slow boot 
up, and then the next time complete failure.  I've lost hard drives 
before, but in the past they've given me enough marginal performance and 
warning signs so that I was able to rescue any data not already backed up.

About the IBM drives - I think they redesigned them so that old problem 
was fixed?  Not sure, but I read some reports last year that mentioned a 
redesign.

Lyle