[lug] Hard Drive Manufacturer Suggestion

[John Karns]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, D. Stimits wrote:

> My experience is that SCSI Seagate drives are extremely reliable.
>
> Side note: Drive temperature is a huge influence on whether they die early. 
> Good cooling or heat conduction is extremely helpful. If you can't touch the 
> drive and feel it is no more than "warm" then temperature will destroy your 
> drive early in life.

Agreed.  Goes double for laptops, which lack the cooling airspace of a 
desktop box.  It's a combination of the case design and the bios.  If the 
case doesn't allow for adequate air flow, and if the physical location of 
the hd is not sufficiently isolated from the CPU, the chances of hd 
failure are a lot closer to certainty.  In some cases there are available 
drivers and software which can help to avoid the problem.  I think that 
with laptops in particular, people are blaming the hd mfr's when they 
should be blaming the laptop mfr.

The situation is aggravated with the high clock speeds of the past 3 to 4 
yrs.  It can be alleviated a bit by making such considerations as above a 
part of the purchasing process.  From direct experience, two identical 
machines, the only practical difference being that of clock speed - 700 
Mhz vs 1.2 Ghz, both P3's - the machine with the slower CPU runs noticably 
cooler.  The subjective performance difference is hardly noticeable.

Lastly, my choice for a laptop hd is usually to take a slower rpm drive 
when the choice is available, other factors being equal.

-- 
John Karns