hard drive woes (Hey Hal, It's On Topic!!!)

[zscoundrel]

Think about this.  The newer drives are several orders of magnitude more 
dense than they were three years ago.  They are much more fragile, 
sensitive, the actual discrete bit area is much smaller and the media is 
much thinner.

I have a 10gig that is throwing crc errors, it is only 3 years old and 
was a mid sized drive when I bought it -  just like most of the other 
drives I have bought.

Now get this! I just bought a 60 gb drive for LESS than I paid for the 
10gig 3 years ago, which was less than I paid for the previous 1gig,  or 
the 400 meg before that, or the 250mb before that, or the 120mb before 
that, or the 80mb before that or even the USED 40mb hard card before that.

In fact, I have to go all the way back to the late '80s and a USED 20mb 
hard card to beat the price I got on the 60 gig. (Granted this was a 
Looong time ago and the drive was probably used by the project team that 
invented dirt, but I digress!)

My point???  With drive prices in free fall and the consumers demanding 
ever increasing storage volume (doubling every 18 months!) at some point 
the companies are going to have to cross the line where it costs more to 
make a drive than what they can sell it for, and quality will suffer.  I 
think we have just seen this happen.

It is kind of a vicious circle really, we have to buy more drives to 
keep up with our voracious appetites for storage space, as well as 
replacing the drives fail, but the drives are failing faster so we are 
replacing them faster and starting to double up on PC's because we have 
dual boot or dual computers to have Linux on one and 'doze on the other 
so we are buying more shoddy drives, which fail faster . . . .

All the drive makers see is escalating sales and they think they are 
absolute business geniuses.  They don't realize we are starting to hate 
them for making failure prone devices that we can't depend on so we have 
to buy several to do raid striping so we are buying more drives which of 
course are failing faster so . . . .   ARGH!

If we don't fuss at the companies that make drives and tell them we 
would rather pay a more and have drives with a 5 or 10 year life span 
(10 years MTBF) we are not going to get better drives.

*** See Hal, I mentioned computers AND Linux in the same post! ***
***    I told ya I could do it!  (whew! it was tough too!!!)   ***

Scott Long wrote:

> On Thursday 21 November 2002 08:07 pm, Dale wrote:
> 
>>And the world said.. let there be SCSI..
>>and the drive failures reduced dramatically...
>>Personally work with IBM scsi drives and rarely have
>>had one crap out.  Their IDE drives seem to be pretty
>>solid to.. but haven't used one in a very long time.
>>
> 
> Well, if you don't count the DeathStar line.  :-)  Both of mine died on me, 
> and a friend of mine lost his too.  (At least IBM's great about their 
> warranty.)  And now recently there's the whole Fujitsu IDE failing story 
> that's been going around.  I've given up on finding one manufacturer that 
> doesn't have more problems than others...you'll find every manufacturer has 
> people that would never use their drives and other people that will only use 
> them.
> 
> It does seem like most current IDE drives tend to be more fragile than in the 
> past...guess it's just more incentive to make sure you've got all of your 
> important data backed up somewhere.  Hmmm...maybe this will be the final 
> straw to get me to use SCSI in my next computer.
> 
>