Hi Folks,
The bad blocks thread seems to have been quite a timely one in my case, as the HDD in my workstation seems to have lost a platter at lunchtime yesterday ):
I was really after a more general idea about the quality of disks these days. When I were a lad, and hard disks were either 5 or 10 MB in size, the first thing you did was a low level scan and manually map all of the bad sectors. You expected to have to do this every few months to keep it all healthy. Things evolved to disks of the size of a GB or so, and apart from things being more or less automated, the biggest change was that you didn't expect to get any new bad blocks once the disk was up, formatted and running. The appearance of a bad block immediately made the disk suspect. The usual precursor to a failed disk was a bad block, then another one a month later, then a week, then an hour, then dead.
Now, with this 80GB that's just gone bang, there was no warning, It just looks like one sector in 8 is unreadable. Is it now the case that the disks of today are less robust than they used to be? If so, I'm going to start using soft mirroring as a first line of defence! And keep the receipts!
I'd be interested in other peoples experiences.
Cheers,
Steve
