On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, David W. Aquilina wrote:
However, as with most components, everyone has a favorite
brand and everyone has had drives from a particular brand
bite them in the ass before.
I had a bit of a talk with the Intrex person about this. I
had my own preferences derived from statistically
underdetermined data and had assumed that vendors sold disks
that made the most money for them. Over the years I've found
internet vendors I'm happy with. What the Intrex person said
is something like this:
Every disk manufacturer has turned out lots of crap. Every
manufacturing line is different, so even a "good"
manufacturer's 100G may be good, while their 150G isn't.
This year's good manufacturer is next year's bad
manufacturer. The one that you had a horrific experience
with 3yrs ago, is this year turning out the best disks.
There's no way (pointing to me) that you can accumulate
enough statistics to tell whether a manufacturer/brand/model
is any good. The main thing we're interested in is minimal
returns. If we can sit at 1-2% we're OK. If it goes to 6%
we're dead. With this disk (pointing to a disk by a
manufacturer that I'd long ago crossed off my list) you've
got a 1:50 chance if it dying early. You get
$some_reasonable_time (a week? a month? forget what) to
bring it back to us to replace it, after that you go to the
manufacturer.
So with Intrex
o 1:50 chance of the disk failing early, can take it home
and run it hard for $some_reasonable_time and if it dies,
bring it back for an exchange.
With previous internet vendor
o keep a box and foam to ship back disk just in case. If it
dies, get my receipts, phone up for an RMA, pack it up in
box, go to Post Office, insure and ship, wait. Do I want to
be out a disk for 2-3 weeks? Forget it.
The prices at Intrex are not much more than on the internet
and I decided that it was worth an extra money to have
someone who'd already selected a disk with a low return rate
(even though it was from a manufacturer who I didn't buy
from anymore) and who would take it back in
$some_reasonable_time.
Joe
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