[BC] Comparing computers & parts

[Mark W. Croom]

My experience with Western Digital has been mixed as well.

I had some really bad news failures with 40MB drives back when they still had
stepper motors in them. They sure made a different sound than we expect from
today's drives. I bought three systems from Insight and two of the three
drives failed catastrophically (pre-Windows). That was scary for a relative
neophyte tech.

Most of the Caviar series drives I've had my hands ran out of space before
they failed. From about 100MB right on up into the 2GB range. Not long ago I
had a WD Caviar 20GB give out kind of suddenly at one of our remote offices.
It was 5 years old so I should have been expecting its life would be limited.

My experience with all the common brands since those early days has been a
mixed bag. I just recently had a Seagate drive die catastrophically--went from
operating to "click of death" kind of behavior very rapidly. It was in one of
those Netgear "toaster" devices that are designed for SOHO network backups
(I'm using it on my home network). This was a 120GB 7200.7 series drive.

Just this week I did a clean install (Windows 2000 SP4 and patches) on a box
that has a WD Caviar drive of about 20GB capacity. Drive is running fine,
system was just trashed by too many kid-installed accessory programs. I think
the drive is going on seven years old. Yeah it will probably die one of these
fine days but it's not a mission-critical system.

I had a Maxtor that was getting flakey and finally last week it wouldn't boot.
It went from working to questionable to bluescreen in basically a day.

Ran Spinrite on mode 2 overnight and the next day it booted again. I'm going
to replace that drive soon.

I had another Seagate drive (7200.7) that quit this week. Should have done the
Spinrite thing but didn't want to waste a full day on that. So I stuck in a
different drive and did a fresh install. The Seagate still worked--I put it in
as a slave and got the users' data files (and e-mails) off the thing. 

Then I ran got rid of the old partition and ran Spinrite on it. Tested OK and
so I'll use it in some other non-critical application soon.

Too many hours as a computer bench tech in the last week.

Mark
MN


---------- Original Message -----------
From: r j carpenter <rcarpen1 at verizon.net>
To: broadcast at radiolists.net
Sent: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:31:39 -0400
Subject: Re: [BC] Comparing computers & parts

> Over the years I've had three (I think) hard disk failures on 
> desktop machines.  The first was a small Seagate.
> 
> Since then I have had two HD failures, both Western Digital.  I 
> still have a 2 Gby HD they furnished under warranty.   WILLIE: DO 
> YOU WANT THE 2 GBY HD, NEVER USED? (free)
> 
> Oh, and I did have a failure of a Toshiba HD in my two-year-old HP 
> laptop a year ago.
> 
> bob c.