[TriLUG] Computer stores]

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Thu, 21 Jul 2011, Brian Henning wrote:

> But how much more often is a hard drive just a hard drive?

I used to keep track of which manufacturers had the best 
(least likely to fail) drives and I would scour the 
internet each time I wanted another drive. I never had good 
data on which drives were good.

I find that Intrex does that for you. They know which drives 
fail and they don't carry them - they don't want returns. I 
asked Tim, the manager at the Durham store about drives one 
day. He said that it's not by manufacturer. One manufacturer 
can be good this year but not the next. Even within 
manufacturers, some drives are good and some aren't. Tim 
showed me the return numbers for the disk he carries (low 
single digit %). Intrex gives you an extended (3 weeks?) 
time to return a drive if it's bad, so you don't have to 
deal with sending it back to the manufacturer if it dies 
tomorrow. The extended time is plenty to run bad blocks. 
I've had one drive fail badblocks and Intrex exchanged it 
without any hassle. All the drives that survived badblocks 
have run beyond their warrantee.

I happily buy all my drives from Intrex now.

Joe
-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
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