hard drive woes

[Dustin Decker]

On Wed, 20 Nov 2002 admin at kclinux.net wrote:

> 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.

Of the 239 IBM IDE drives (between 30 and 60GB each) I still have listed 
on my inventory, I've experienced a total of 4 failures in 24 months.

Although they didn't cross ship new drives, I've found their warranty 
service on those four to be top notch.  Turn around (from the moment UPS 
picked up failed drives here until I had a new drive in my hands) was 
never more than 4 business days.

Dustin

-- 
I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is 
an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. 
The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a 
teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like 
drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after 
another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics: 

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27.... 

and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER 
key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK 
you hear is another Big Bang. 

Neal Stephenson - "In the beginning was the command line"