[TriLUG] Dieing hard drive?

[Steve Litt]

On Tuesday 30 November 2004 10:58 am, Jason Tower wrote:
> > Unfortunately drives dying is par for the course these days.  Falling
> > prices have roughly equated to falling quality, when considered in
> > aggregate over the past ~8 years.  Hopefully the recent trend (led by
> > Maxtor) back to 3yr warranties will hold the manufacturers to higher
> > quality standards... but somehow I doubt it.
>
> when i build new PCs for my clients, i typically use 4-10gb hard drives
> salvaged from other machines.  that's right, i trust a five year old
> 4gb drive more than i trust a brand new 80gb drive.  the only downside
> is they're a little slow due to the lower data density, but that's not
> reason enough to use new piece of sh*t IDE hard drives.
>
> since virtually every office has a file server there is zero need for
>
> >4gb on most PCs that i encounter.  why on earth doesn't someone make
>
> an inexpensive, quiet, reliable 4-8gb hard drive?

Hi Jason,

In the past year I've purchased two 200GB Western Digital drives and a 250GB 
Western Digital drive, all 7200RPM IDE. If I'm looking at problems down the 
road I'd like to be forewarned. What observations have led you to the 
conclusion that modern drives are less reliable than five year old drives.

As an aside, my business + family has a fleet of 8 computers plus an IPCop 
box. 3 are Win98, the rest are various forms of Linux. I use hard drives til 
they drop, moving them from box to box. I've had only 3 fail:

1. One of the infamous IBM Deskstars failed after 2.5 years of everyday duty.
2. A 1986 MFM drive failed in 1994.
3. A Western Digital 6 or 8 GB from last century died a few weeks ago.

Every other drive I had/have is either still in use, or is retired due to 
obsolence (less than 3GB, etc).

So, as you can see, my plan for the 200+GB drives was to be in use well into 
the next decade, and if I have to make a different plan, I'd like to know it.

SteveT

>
> jason

-- 
Steve Litt
Founder and acting president: GoLUG
http://www.golug.org