MY EXPIERENCE only yours may be different

I have several western digitals in my server from 1992 and they still work.

I have several Western digital units in my courrent crop of systems. Never lost ONE (yet).

I had MAXTORS and lost every one of them! They are crap! they ALL quit working after 2 months of service or LESS!!

Unless you want the "Monica Lewinsky" of drives that can suck a bowling ball through a straw STAY FAR FAR AWAY from Maxtor.

EDIT: Ownage: Page 2.
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1988 Fiero Formula T-tops
CJB 143 of 1252 "factory T-top cars"

[This message has been edited by htexans1 (edited 12-24-2007).]

The marks on that ribbon likely don't mean much. They are probably from testing during drive body manufacturing. They do some tests on drive products before they attach the board. No point putting boards on if they don't pass some basic or even very thorough tests first.

Plus by pre testing... they can add boards of whichever type later since the same body could potentially get a SCSI, SAS, SATA, or PATA, board. Plus the drive body may be built in a different country from where the board will get stuck on it.

silly boys.
Contrary to some info posted , you MUST MUST MUST cool the hdd's. if you don;t well stop your complaining. they all get hot, and the majority of failures are electronic. I can;t tell you how many dirves I recovered data from by freezing them first.

I have som 1992 maxtor drives still running in my home server. all fan cooled. work fine. they are small drives tho, 10 or 20 gigers.
the larger drivesmake more heat and are more susceptable to failure. I even have a 30 gig deathstar that is over 8 years old (30 gig)
that works fine.

No hdd is fool proof. you can only stack the odds in your favor. cool them. back them up. I know lots of people who lost seagates and western digitals, all fairly new. brands don;t mean squat anymore, a fujitsu is just as likely to outlast a seagate as any other. maybe more. is it as fast? usually not. but you have to plan your disk useage and what you need for any given drive.
with the wonderfull new breeds of controllers for sata, set up a raid. you can do a striped pair mirrored to another striped pair. auto backup, and decent speed. the mirror slows the overall performance, but that is one of the choices you have to make.

large external usb drives are great for backup, leave them off til you need to move data and they will last forever. make sure the unit you get has a fan in it, many do not.
do I seem to harp on cooling? well pay attention!!!! I;ve been in hardware for mainframes and computers for over 30 years. cooling is the key to long life and reliability. don;t agree? well you have much to learn then, and some of us old folks who understand the hardware know what makes things work, and what makes them last.

I am running a raid 0+1 in my server with 4 160GB WD SATA HD's. I just lost a drive the other day. I lost nothing, just threw in another drive and rebuilt the array rebooted and I was off and running. RAID is the only way to go if you have important data that you don't want to lose or spend hours restoring. Now you would be up a creek if you lost two drives at the same time. I'm not saying that will not happen because it does especially if the HD's come off the same line and are in the same lot. So if you plan on a RAID setup buy your HD's from different places to insure that you get HD's with different lot numbers if that makes sense.

Of course you hafta keep the HDDs cool - all my drives have coolers on 'em, ---> (see? ) and they have been very very happy. What I meant is that some drives do not like being freezing cold all the time, they last longer if they are around room temperature. Freezing drives DOES help recover data,(maxtor, maxtor, maxtor ), but you hafta watch out for condensation. Frozen HDD = goodness. Melting HDD with wet circuit boards = not so ideal...

[This message has been edited by FieroRumor (edited 12-26-2007).]

I had frozen my HDD overnight (for about 8 hours) and that didn't seem to help so I actually opened up the drive. The platters were stuck - and I mean really stuck. At first I couldn't even move them by hand but after a litlle bit of force (carefully) they loosened - sorta. It sounds like the little motor lost a bearing or something. The platters spin up now (although it takes about 10 seconds before they are at full speed) but it sounds like a little plane on a conveyor belt trying to take off.

So I think this HDD is now officially deceased.

quote Originally posted by Cliff Pennock: I had frozen my HDD overnight (for about 8 hours) and that didn't seem to help so I actually opened up the drive. The platters were stuck - and I mean really stuck. At first I couldn't even move them by hand but after a litlle bit of force (carefully) they loosened - sorta. It sounds like the little motor lost a bearing or something. The platters spin up now (although it takes about 10 seconds before they are at full speed) but it sounds like a little plane on a conveyor belt trying to take off. So I think this HDD is now officially deceased.

Were you able to get your data off?
Or was it not enough of an issue to worry about?

A company like Drivesavers might be able to get the data of those platters ofr about $3,000. Not sure the data is worth that...?

Why not just get



Seriously, at this point it would have saved you a ton of cash just in the time it takes you to restore backups. You can get a cheap RAID controller for next to nothing. You dont need a super fast controller if the only reason you want it is to protect data. Then just run RAID 1, mirroring. Then you drop a drive, nothing notices. If you have more than 1 drive, run RAID 5, then you only need 1 spare, or if you've got the bucks, run RAID 1 with duplicates for all drives.

I would look into it if you keep dropping drives.

I already restored from a backup, but that backup was two days old. So all I lost (that is of any importance) was 2 days worth of emails. And normally I wouldn't care about the emails (and simply ask people to resend those emails) but there are a few emails I wanted to save of which I'm pretty sure the senders don't want to resend them.

Oh and I lost a few seasons of tv series I downloaded since I don't backup those. No biggy.

quote Originally posted by Cliff Pennock: Oh and I lost a few seasons of tv series I downloaded since I don't backup those. No biggy.

*Cough*... I uhh, need to work on my firewall blacklist.... which websites should I make sure no one can access that might ...

Ahh screw it, I miss tv-links, where are you going?

I received a replacement (refurbished) HDD from Seagate/Maxtor yesterday, as replacement of the defective HDD. It failed within a few hours.

THe old HDD was built in to my computer, this one I had built in to an external SATA enclosure. Both my computer as well as the HDD external enclosure are behind (seperate) surge protectors. The problem seems to be the same as with the old HDD - it won't spin up (stuck platters again?)... Seriously, is this the quality of todays computer equipment?

Jebus!!
I'd send you a 150 gig but I'm afraid you'd break it.

I can't wait till solid state hard drives are the norm.

quote Originally posted by buddycraigg: all i could hear was a 50's or 60's air cooled Porsche or VW driving through town honking it's horn

I listened to the sound clip, then read that. Made me laugh damn it, that was funny as Hell!


As for any input I might have on the subject, I have had a few different computers, some for a while, and four in the house right now. I can knock on wood, that I have been lucky enough to not have had a hard drive failure of any brand. (Why do I have this feeling, this will come back to bite me in the butt?) The computer I'm using now, has a Samsung 80 gig, with the OS on it, then I added a Western Digital 250 gig for storage and back up. Computer has been here about three years plus now.

Kevin

quote Originally posted by tjm4fun: I have som 1992 maxtor drives still running in my home server. all fan cooled. work fine. they are small drives tho, 10 or 20 gigers.

"1992... 10 or 20 gigers"

No way, must be a typo.

I just read on a blog from a guy with a computer store that he has been getting an unusual high number of Seagate HD returns lately, all with failed bearings.

It seems Seagate/Maxtor has a problem with their new(er) drives.

My Seagate 500 failed just the other day. It sounded like a race car. I'm going to be shipping it to Seagate for replacement in the next few days, once I have time to pack it up and go to the post office.

Probably spindle bearings. Damn it.

Anyway, this is the first time I've had ANY drive go bad since my WD 1.2 GB drive went bad in about 2000. I had only just backed up the contents of that drive like two weeks earlier, on a paranoid impulse, which made this event more of an annoyance than anything else. If you have hard drives, sooner or later you'll have one die. It's just how it is.

Cliff, what's the URL for that blog? I'd like to read it, thanks.

Ed

quote Originally posted by edhering: Cliff, what's the URL for that blog? I'd like to read it, thanks.

I searched through my history and can't find it... I'll search some more.

I have two WD 150b Rapotors in raid 0 and they're the fastest best performing HD's I've had. Been up 24/7 for about 6 months maybe a bit less.