[TriLUG] Dieing hard drive?

[Jason Tower]

> 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.

i build and maintain a lot of PCs for my clients, and i'm speaking from 
experience.  my observation over the past several years is that recent 
hard drives (80gb and up) are -far- more likely to fail than hard 
drives from a few years ago, both after a short term of service and all 
too often right out of the box.

i have a pair of 250gb disks in my workstation, and another in $WIFE's 
PC.  they haven't failed yet, but you can be sure i rsync them every 
night.

jason