Re: Bad hard drives

Post #50,617 by pwhysall 9/5/02 11:18:07 AM Reply	Re: Bad hard drives Quantum disks are among the best I've seen for reliability and performance. I'm basing this on a bunch of servers with RAID 5 disk arrays built from Quantum Atlas V disks. They just don't fail. Peter [link\|http://www.debian.org\|Shill For Hire] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Blog]
Post #50,724 by orion 9/5/02 10:38:24 PM Reply	Mine did perhaps they built the IDE 80M drives differently back then? I imagine they got better QC when they started making the RAID drives? *[link\|http://games.speakeasy.net/data/files/khan.jpg\|"Khan!!!" -Kirk]*
Post #50,738 by Andrew Grygus 9/5/02 11:06:18 PM Reply	All brands fail at a fairly high rate. Particular models and particular manufacturing runs within any particular brand may have unusually high failure rates. The result is that some people think a particular brand is great, and others think it's trash - depends on whether they got one of those lots. I remember one Toshiba model I used years ago, where every single drive died in less than two years (with loud clanking noises). I had particularly good luck with Fujitsu, but they've pulled out of the desktop drive business. Haven't had any IBM IDE failures, but haven't used that many of their drives (and they're cashing in the drive chips too). Have had more failures than I like with IBM SCSI drives, but not as bad as Seagate (never used any of those 80-Gig IBMs which failed early and often). I've never liked Maxtors much, but there's not a lot left right now with consistent availability. A lot of system builders swear by Western Digital, but my experience hasn't been that good (and I'm very annoyed that jumpering is different between "single" and "master", so you have to change jumpers if you add or remove anything else on the cable. That alone disqualifies them as far as I'm concerned. Seagates have just given me bad experiences more consistently than other brands. Their early 3" drives were the worst ever - I couldn't get them out the door before they failed. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #50,752 by deSitter 9/6/02 12:17:27 AM Reply	Re: All brands fail at a fairly high rate. I exactly concur - early IBM SCSI tended to fail. I think IBM SCSI were actually made by Seagate. Seagates have failed more often than any other drives I can remember. The last of the Model 95s were sold with Maxtor SCSI drives. BTW someone mentioned Quantum Atlas - these are now Maxtor Atlas (just bought one :). Did you say IBM is giving up its disk business? Why? Also exact same experience with those great Fujitsu tank drives (beige metal case). One interesting them about them - they seemed to ship with the write cache disabled. Adaptec Ez-SCSI could be used to turn it on, with dramatic effects. -drl
Post #50,768 by Andrew Grygus 9/6/02 2:48:18 AM Reply	Yes, IBM is dumping hard disks Their hard disk business is going to a "joint venture" with Hitachi, but the implication was that IBM was not the major partner. The stated reason is profitability, but I've also read about some stuff in IBM's labs that could obsolete hard disks. Perhaps it's a little farther along than recent articles have indicated. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #50,772 by Ashton 9/6/02 2:58:35 AM Reply	Ulp____What a nonsequitur___ stock assessment time?
Post #50,821 by deSitter 9/6/02 10:33:26 AM Reply	Re: Yes, IBM is dumping hard disks I still find it curious, because AFAIK IBM is mostly responsible for the basic magnetic materials and magneto-resistive head research that made giant drives possible. See this graphic: <img src="[link\|http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/ipl/oem/images/techimages/fig1.jpg"\|http://www.storage....es/fig1.jpg"]> -drl

Welcome to IWETHEY!