On Friday, May 30, 2003, at 06:31 PM, Mike T. wrote:
An IBM 16gig hard drive I purchased in 1999 is still going strong, like the
day I got it. The 80mb hd's in several Compact Macs that I've aquired over
the past 2 years have run super, no problems at all. On the other hand, I
know several people who own Gateway computers (ehhwwwwww!) and they each
have been through at least 3 hard drives each in the same time period.
Gateway mainly uses WD drives, and in the time frame you're talking about they got a bad model run or two...Betcha most of those people had the old WD 1.6 G drive fail. Those were notoriously bad (this was in the P-133/P-166 era) we've had every one of those fail on us that came into the building. Most were eventually upgraded by Gateway to larger, more reliable models. They also had a buncha 6GB ones go really fast...they're also being upgraded as they go.
That said, Gateways are not actually all that unreliable (sez the guy who supports about 200 of 'em in his day job), and at least Gateway's corporate tech support doesn't blow like Dell's. Methinks that Stephen the Dell Duuude isn't the only one partaking various leafy green substances.
Dragging it back on topic...
In my experience, drive reliability, in the main, seems to be related to model variances. Certain models just seem to fail more often. Actually, this goes for most components, it seems. We had a string of power supply failures in one Gateway model, they've switched suppliers for new ones.
Also, in the olden days (back when an 80 MB drive cost $200, for instance) drives were more well made. I have a Seagate ST410800N that is built like a tank. It has run for years and years (24/7 as a data drive on a SGI workstation for many of them) and has never given me so much as a hiccup.
Of course, along with being built like a tank comes being as *big* and noisy as one too ;-)
Finally, the single best thing you can do for your computer is to get it a nice, well powered UPS to feed it nice, clean, steady power. APC rocks. I recommend them to everyone. They will greatly enhance the life of your computer.
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