[lug] Hard Drive Manufacturer Suggestion

[Ferdinand Schmid]

HI,

In the mid to late 90s we had many Western Digital drives (Caviar).  As others 
already wrote we had many failures - eventually 100%.  I understand they had 
gasket problems.

Then we used IBM drives and found a less than perfect track record.  Around 
30% of the SCSI drives failed within 2 years and around 20% of the IDE drives 
did in the same time frame.  

Then I went to Seagate drives.  To date (since around mid 2000) I haven't seen 
any failures (on over 50 drives).  Most of them are IDE (both, parallel and 
SATA).  But I also have some 15 kRPM drives that have been running for years 
now without problems.  Seagate is the only company that offers a 5 year 
warranty - and I see why.  Their drives run reliably and quiet.

For capacity reasons I set up a RAID system with 8 200GB drives about 1.5 
years back.  Seagate didn't offer 200 GB drives at the time.  Earlier this 
year I lost two of those drives within days on this RAID array.  What fun!!  
Plus those drives are very noisy, compared to the Seagate drives.

Also - take a look at the diagnostics software from IBM, Maxtor, and Seagate 
offer.  The IBM and Maxtor utilities are slow and very basic.  Seagate offers 
a nice solution on floppy and as a CD ISO.  They offer memory test, 
controller test, and a very nice and fast disk test.  They are in my opinion 
the clear leader in the 3.5" disk market.

Laptop HDDs are a different story - and I have lost a few Hitachi disks and a 
Toshiba disk in the last years.  

No matter what you do - backups are essential.

Ferdinand

On Friday 03 December 2004 08:26, Chris Brotherton wrote:
> I used to be a big fan of Western Digital, but lately I have had problems
> with them.  My current drive just died after 5 months.
>
> I was curious what manufacturers you guys liked.
>
> Chris.
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-- 
Ferdinand Schmid
Architectural Energy Corporation
Celebrating over 20 Years of Improving Building Energy Performance
http://www.archenergy.com