This looks a bit behind the current thread - I tried to send it a few
days ago and the list spat it back because the mailbox was full.
Apologies :o)
On 17 Jan 2006, at 20:15, Jason Mayfield-Lewis wrote:
From what I've seen, the only range that ever had such a
significant failure rate was the 75GXP, and it's been ages since
they sold one of those.
May even have been an IBM design. My dad has one of those era
Deathstars and you can hear it on the other side of the room - it's
horrible.
Every manufacturer has been trhough a bad model or two (WD went
through a couple when drives were at about 6-10GB)
As did Seagate, Maxtor and IBM. That period was one of the worst in
my memory when drive size was expanding at such a rapid rate that
manufacturers had some serious QA slip-ups. See my previous post
about Apple's bad luck.
and I killed a Samsung 10GB drive (dunno why I bought that one!)
within 2 days of owning it! (Never bought one since, but my laptop
came with an 80GB 5400 samsung drive, and it's quiet and fast.
Maybe I'll stop being paranoid one day, or maybe I'll just stick my
spare Travelstar E7K in it)
Never used Samsung. Think my dad has a 20-40GB Spinpoint in one of
his computers, never seems to have given him any trouble. They make
nice TFT panels though...
My experience of Seagate drives has been that they're slow and hot
running (though quiet if that suits you).
My 40GB U5 runs a bit hot, but it's got a rubber insulating jacket
around it which can't help. Their 10k SCSI drives get really hot, I
nearly burnt myself swapping one out of a PowerMac once. I have a
pair of Barracuda 7200.7s in my PC that are deathly silent (not that
it makes much odds in my PC the fans are like a VAX), a 7200.8 80GB
in my G4 and a 7200.9 200GB in my external box. They all run hot but
not concerningly so. I've found the speed to be good but not
astounding, but then I tend to prefer slower, more robust and quiet
drives to fast ones.
I think Hitachi have learned a lot about HD design recently, they
keep coming out with really fast 7200RPM drives.
Yeh, making small hard disks has helped them make the larger ones
more efficient. They are definitely a big player and they are one of
Seagate's only big rivals in the enterprise SCSI market.
Seagate's latest generation of Barracudas is the same - they've
learned a lot from making Momentus 2.5" drives I think. My newest
200GB Barra spins up in less than a second and runs much cooler than
the previous generation 80GB in the G4.
I've had some bad experience with Maxtor, but that said, I have a
20GB drive from them that's been running 24x7 for about 7 years!
(along side a couple of IBMs even older and a Seagate 17GB drive
I've sworn was on the way out due to the horrible clunking noises
it's been making for the whole 3 years since I thought to put it in
my XBox! lol).
Here's a cracker. I have a Fujitsu 10GB drive that resides in my
Amiga 1200 tower system (it's too much to explain and way off
topic!!) that was once used as a slave on a Rev. 1 B&W (I was young
and stupid back then!!!). The last 24% or so of the surface is toast,
but the first 76% is totally error free. It's been running for years
in various machines as a 7GB hard disk without any loss of data or
anything. As long as you keep off the dead zone it's fine!
My oldest hard disk is a 5MB (yes MB!!) Seagate 5.25" 1" height
drive. Runs fine - sounds like a small jet and needs manually
parking, but it's still going after 20 years!
--
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