graywolf wrote: > Still I am interested in how often folks here have experienced > hard-drive failure, and with which type of drive (IDE, SATA, > SCSI, other), and anyone else's experience with RAID systems.
I've experienced nearly every type of failure on every brand and type of "hard disk" that's existed since some time in the 1970s. Anything will fall over if you push on it hard enough. I was a co-op student for IBM when PC AT (or was it PC XT) 5.25" 10MB or 20MB drives were dropping like flies ... literally by the train-car load. IIRC, the DOA rate was on the order of 20-30% and the "dead after a month" rate was twice that. It was so bad that our divisional director rammed through "blue labeling" of a different manufacturer's drive just for our division's customers. Did the same thing with Novell's NetWare when LAN Man was such a joke (ca. 1984). Had some pretty funny, nearly serious non-failures, too. Like the day I accidentally spilled a fresh six-ounce cup of coffee, one cream, two sugars, into an open spindle drive. I was cleaning sticky goo out of the housing for weeks, but the platters and mechanicals never skipped a beat. Of course, that was like a 5MB drive made of about ten platters, each something like 10-12" across. Sprinkle some iron filings on the platter and you could almost read the bits with the naked eye. -- Thanks, DougF (KG4LMZ) -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
