well, FWIW, IDE drive quality seems to be dropping. i have has several failures on my recent drives within a year of their purchase. i have had very few problems with drives up until i started going above 80Gs. i have been using hard drives for backup, keeping two external copies of each drive in my computer and rotating between them. since i upgrade drive capacities about once a year and replace the drives, fading isn't an issue. i've been meaning to make extra backups to DVD+R, but haven't done so yet. my current backup strategy has let me survive a motherboard IDE controller failure that took out both attached hard drives, a failure of a boot drive, and two failures of my data drives, without losing anything. i've taking to running a SMART monitor program called Drive Check from Passmark Software periodically to check the error statistics on my drives.
Herb.... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Keith Whaley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, April 24, 2004 5:48 AM Subject: Re: CD-R lifetimes disputed > To reiterate (and for clarification) IBM says their IDE drives are NOT > suitable for 24 hour service? Where did they say that? > > Or, does that mean for constant use, such as in servers, and doesn't > apply to home use, where the drive may be powered up, but not actually > spun up and being used in R/W situations.
