Brian Martin wrote: > > Is there any consensus on brands/models of hard drives to avoid ? or that > are recommended ? > e.g. known lemons or known dependable models, or are they all much the same > in quality & dependability ? > Sorry if not strictly linux centred, but a search of the SLUG archives > showed a lot of discussion threads about drive failures, power supply & > temperature related issues.
I've had a few drives over the last couple of years, and all have found a way to disappoint me. In my recent experience it seems that a reliable (IDE) drive doesn't exist anymore. I have drives of capacity <= 4Gb that are still going strong, but nothing above that has lasted longer than 2-3 years, and the lifetime of the larger disks (20Gb+) keeps getting smaller and smaller. The 60Gb Maxtor drive that I purchased to replace a Seagate 20Gb and a Quantum 20Gb, which both started showing signs of imminent failure at about the same time, is now showing the same signs, and it's barely a year old. Hard drive reviews have never been useful to me. They only ever focus on short term testing with the priority being the speed of the drive. I don't care what the peak transfer rate of the drive is if it barely makes it past the warranty period before faulting! So, what are the signs? I'm glad you asked. Hands up who has seen the infamous "hda: interrupt lost" kernel error message? You've just hard-reset your PC, because it seemed to be frozen, and the HDD light was stuck on. You check /var/log/messages to see what went wrong, and you find this cryptic message there. You search google, and see that while many people have seen this error, nobody seems to have any idea what it means or how to fix it. Firstly, your PC is not frozen, but your hard disk is! Giving it a firm rap on the side usually does the trick for me, causing the computer to spring back to life. Somehow the disk heads seem to get "stuck"... you can hear it when it happens; it has a very distinctive sound. A sound that asks, "Why are today's hard disks so crap?" Perhaps it's time to up the hard disk budget by 300% and buy SCSI... Matthew -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
