My experience with Seagate, while not exactly recent, soured me on them
forever. In the early 90's I had many Seagate drives, all of which
developed bad blocks at an alarming rate. Since then I have used WD
almost exclusively; not once in the last 5 years have I had even one bad
block. I still have some of the old WD drives, ranging from 280MB to
1.2GB. They all work fine, but are much too small for my purposes. At
this time I have one 30GB WD, a 30GB Maxtor, and a 40GB Maxtor all in
the same box and they're running just fine. The WD is on a different IDE
port than the Maxtors, though, just to be safe.
Jay DeKing
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [expert] hard drive experiences (was 8.0 final --brakes
MANY applications (Software Installeris first on that list))
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 00:17:36 +0000
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I have heard a number of stories about Seagate's drives being fast, but
having
problems losing sectors outside of this list. It seems that most
current hard
drives very rarely loose sectors unless there is a significant defect
and the
drive is not going to last much longer. On the other hand I hear that
it is not
uncommon for a Seagate drive just to loose a few sectors here and a few
sectors
there. It is as if most drive manufactures find the limit of a
particular
manufacturing process and then back off of to the point where no data
will be
lost under normal use. Then Seagate comes along and tries to push the
envelope
a little more than anyone else on a particular process to get a little
better
density on those high end SCSI drives. (Higher RPMs usually mean lower
density.) With predictive diagnostics and sector remapping, this
shouldn't be
too much of a problem, but I hear not all controllers (like SimBios)
properly
handle sector remapping. In a big file server with lots of little
files,
occasionally having two files share the same sector and overwriting each
other
is not too big of a problem. But when running a large DBMS system with
hundreds, if not thousands of disks, a slip sector can cause many a bad
hair
day. (Please take note these are stories that I hear not first hand
experience.)
> On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Walter Luffman wrote:
>
> > Let me see if I have this straight. At various times Western Digital, IBM,
> > Quantum and Maxtor have all produced drives that are lemons. These makers
> > have also produced some very good drives. Is that about right?
> >
> > Okay, who has horror stories to tell about Seagate and Fujitsu?
>
> I've heard nasty stories about Fujitsu, but I had 2 of them (IDE) in my
> 486, and they outlived the power supply in its tower case. :)
>
> Regarding Seagate, I've had problems with them developing lots of
> badblocks. In the two systems I had functioning as servers w/ seagate
> drives (SCSI) they both began dropping blocks within 1-3 years. One of
> those has a fairly hard-hit RAID w/ 4 IBM drives the array. None of those
> have failed yet (after 3+ years)
>
> All of the new systems I've built in the past year or so (around five)
> have IBM drives now. None of those has had any problems at all, and some
> of them are servers with constant load.
>
> -pete
