Re: Western Digital hard drives are garbage

From: Zed Pobre (zed_at_resonant.org)
Date: 05/20/05 

Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 20:17:04 GMT

JPS@no.komm <JPS@no.komm> wrote:
> In message <428bf875.14054437@news-server.houston.rr.com>,
> spam@spamcop.com (Bob) wrote:
>
>>On 18 May 2005 18:40:02 -0700, messenjah@mailinator.com wrote:
>>
>>>I've had six of them go within the year, total crap. The Caviars are
>>>complete junk. Stick with Maxtor or Seagate.
>>
>>You need to quit abusing them.
>
> I have to say, I've heard for years that "WD" is the best, and that
> Maxtor is crap, but I have used Maxtors to WDs in a ratio of about 2:1,
> and I have seen 2 WDs fail, and no Maxtors.

My primary job is system administration, so I work with a lot of hard
drives, and push them somewhat hard. We don't use WD, but Maxtor has
had the lowest survival rate of any of the other hard drives that
we've used since they merged with Quantum a few years back. After
having two hard drives fail in less than six months, and then the two
replacements failing in less than six months, and then the two
replacements of *those* failing in less than six months, I finally
took the hint and stopped buying them completely.

Asking other admins, I found out it's not just me. Doing a bit of
research on hard drives in that community gave me three brands that
are supposed to be high quality under load:

Seagate
Hitachi
Fujitsu

We're currently testing Seagate 400s (in both SATA and PATA) and are
about to start testing a batch of Hitachi (PATA only) drives, and
(knock on wood) the Seagates haven't failed yet (going about 6 months
so far). I've found out that Seagate drives have significantly higher
startup current than Hitachis, though (2.8A vs 2.0A), which can cause
them to fail in some single external enclosure units, which tend to
have marginal power supplies. Seagates have the better warranties,
though, which speaks well of company confidence, at least.

I've previously had bad experiences with IBM drives, but I'm told that
limited to a single manufacturing batch, and they're much better than
I think. I wouldn't know, as I haven't bought those since then,
either. 

-- 
Zed Pobre <zed@resonant.org> a.k.a. Zed Pobre <zed@debian.org>
PGP key and fingerprint available on finger; encrypted mail welcomed.

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