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

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

>>>>> "Lyle" == Lyle Saxon <Lyle> writes:

    Lyle> The drive was two years old, have you experience failures
    Lyle> with newer versions of Seagate?

The only times I've had problems were with Micropolis (just before
they went out of business, I had 3 failures from one of their drives
within warranty!) but that was ten years ago.  All my other failures
were either within warranty and the replacement achieved an honorable
discharge years later, or well out of warranty.  I even had about 4 of
that infamous IBM/Hitachi model, none of which failed within warranty,
and only one of which failed early enough that it was worth replacing.

Currently (of recent models; I've got at least one 10-year-old drive
still in R/O service for archives---why throw it out when it's still a
lot faster than the CDs they're backed up to?) I only have IBM drives
in operation and one IBM on the shelf.  Why IBM, I don't know---I just
buy what's cheap, keep a stock (by buying two smaller drives instead
of one big one), and stay away from new technology (eg, when spindle
RPMs get bumped, I wait until the fast speed has 20% of the market,
etc).  I would guess this costs me about 20-30% more than thorough
purchase cost minimization, but I don't see how to improve on the TCO,
including "my time" and "my peace of mind".

I'm not recommending this pattern to anyone else (in particular, many
people care more about performance than I do), but it works for me.  I
thought Jake Morrison's post was an excellent one in the same vein.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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