[BC] Comparing computers & parts

[Cowboy]

On Monday 29 October 2007 03:16 pm, Mark W. Croom wrote:
>  
>  My experience with Western Digital has been mixed as well.

 Mixed, but not so much.
 WD's usually lose their bearings. Recoverable, but requires
 a clean room, and some degree of expertise.
 Track alignment is lost, so it appears the entire drive is gone,
 but BIOS still identifies it correctly.
 Not much one can do to prevent this. It's a materials thing.

>  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.

 Seagates usually lose their electronics before mechanical failure.
 New electronics, and some software magic to recover the low-level mapping,
 and they are normally recoverable without a clean room.
 Generally, they'll spin up, but BIOS won't recognize it at all.
 The best prevention here, is excess cooling.

 You'll get that click if a head goes bad, too. That's another clean room job,
 but usually recoverable if the user hasn't tried too hard to recover it themselves.
 BIOS recognizes the drive, but beyond that is a crap shoot.

>  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.

 Maxtor's seem very reliable. Real ones. They seem counterfeited more
 often than others. Now that they're a part of Seagate, who knows ?

 The worst is a head crash. Most of the data is recoverable, but that last little
 bit becomes questionable at almost any price. Usually less than 5 percent
 goes into the truly unrecoverable category, where that head has actually 
 impacted the platter and scratched it.
 A head crash is most often the result of either an impact, or a user trying to
 continue using the drive after bearing failure.

 They're all still pretty much the old Winchester technology, with refinements.

 Automated backups are your friend.
 People get lazy, forget to do things. Machines don't !!
 People heal after an injury. Machines don't !

-- 
Cowboy