I work for a VAR/System Integrator for medical billing systems. As the
in house tech, network admin and hardware geek, I have built 233 systems
this year and it was a so-so year as far as volume goes. We are trying
to slowly move out of the customer hardware business, so a decrease of
volume was a good thing. About 40 of them were servers with SATA RAID
arrays. We use Maxtor, Seagate, WD, Hitachi and Samsung hard drives in
mostly equal proportions. Looking over my records of the past seven
years, I can say that except for the blip in WD failures caused by the
bad controller chip on the drive electronics boards on certain drives
with 6.8gb per platter in 1999, we have noticed that no particular model
or brand of drive has a higher failure rate than any other. We did
notice that the Samsung 60gb and 80gb PATA drives have had only 13
failures out of 766 drives purchased and put into service. This may be
due to the fact that we have used Samsung for three years and the
failure rate may rise after more time is accumulated Hitachi/IBM
failures have dropped since IBM sold them to Hitachi. Combined failures
on them were 33 out of 2867 purchases. The failure rate for WD was 66
out of 3915 purchases, Seagate was 12 out of 718. So the rates were
approximately the same. The amount for Maxtor was 54 out of 3233.
The WD's with the bad controller chip that were recalled by WD didn't
fail in service but were detected with a screening utility from WD. The
drives were replaced by WD at no cost. We had sold only 44 of them
before the defect was noticed and the drives were recalled and replaced
before any failures occurred.
Most of these drives were placed into service in new equipment on
customers premises so it was not a uniform controlled environment,
neither did we control power cycles, run time or on site physical
conditions.
One of the beanies of my job, I get to keep all defective hardware that
is RMA'ed from the vendor and all hardware that is traded in by
customers.. So I have all of those replaced drives in my garage storage
or in my equipment. All of my Mac's and PeeCee's are maxed on drive
space. Last check of inventory in my garage, I had seven 66 liter
Sterlite bins full of hard drives from 245mb to 200gb, both SCSI and
IDE. The only condition of keeping the hardware is I can't sell it or
give it away. It's personal use only. My new Rev2 G3 B&W just got a
36gb SCSI drive and 2 80gb IDE drives installed. I also have
accumulated over 200 sticks of PC66/100/133 SDRAM in sizes of 32mb to
512mb.
James
--
www.blackcube.org The Texas State Home for Wayward and Orphaned Computers
--
G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and...
Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives |
-- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! |
Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html>
G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml>
--> AOL users, remove "mailto:";
Send list messages to: <mailto:g-list@mail.maclaunch.com>
To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/>
iPod Accessories for Less
at 1-800-iPOD.COM
Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal
www.1800ipod.com
