> Let me see if I have this straight. At various times Western Digital, IBM,
> Quantum and Maxtor have all produced drives that are lemons. These makers
> have also produced some very good drives. Is that about right?
Most likely. I have no direct experience with WD or Quantum; my brother had
a 10GB Quantum IDE that went south within 6 months after purchasing it, but
he was able to get a replacement. I've had Maxtor drives for years - I
recently retired a 345 meg (!) Maxtor drive after seven years of service. You
wouldn't be able to tell (apart from the low capacity) that it was used. :)
In other words, zero bad sectors in 7 years of moderately heavy use. My
other Maxtor (still used) is a newer 1.6 gig; it has developed one or two
bad sectors over that time (I got it in 1996) unfortunately. It does have the
unfortunate tendency to lock the computer up completely if one reads/writes
into the bad sectors.
> Okay, who has horror stories to tell about Seagate and Fujitsu? (I've never
> used Fujitsu, although I put one into a machine I built for my nephew and
> AFAIK it's still working fine. The only Seagate drive I've ever owned was a
I"ve owned a couple Seagates, but not in a very long time, which given the
manufacturing process improvements, probably doesn't amount to that much
valuable data at any rate. My first one was the ubiquitous ST-225. That
one lasted 13 months before it went dead. I replaced it with an ST-238 which
lasted a little while - but in 1991 I got a PB (ick) computer with an ST-1441
(I think - 120mb) and that drive was the pits. It didn't survive two years
without developing serious problems.
FWIW - back around the time frame of the MFM/RLL drives (ca. 1987) there was
a DOS utilities guy, Paul Mace. He made a set of disk utilities comparable
to PC-Tools/Norton Utilities. Anyway, he once made the comment that the
average lifespan of a hard drive was 18 months. :(
> Walter Luffman, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Medina, TN USA
> Diabetics are just sweet people (Type 2 5/99, d/e/m/motorcycle)
> "Sage", purple 1998 Honda VT1100C Shadow Spirit
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David E. Fox Thanks for letting me
[EMAIL PROTECTED] change magnetic patterns
[EMAIL PROTECTED] on your hard disk.
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>
