> When I worked in a hardware shop, it seems like drives became
> more and more unrecoverable as technology advanced.  I took that to
> mean that they were reliable enough that they only failed if they were
> really, really dead.

I couldnt agree with this any more.  I no longer "depend" on IDE drives for
important data any more.  Seems when drives got larger than 10 gig, they
seem to fail alot more often.  I have four Maxtor 6 gig IDE drives in one
system, and I've never had a problem with them.  But for at least the past
2 years, I've had 10 to 80 gig drives go out from Maxtor, Western Digital,
and Seagate. I havent tried IBM's desktop hard drives yet, but if they're
as reliable as their laptop drives in Toshiba Tecras, no thanks.

I have yet to see one of my SCSI drives go out for the last 4 years.