I have heard a number of stories about Seagate's drives being fast, but having
problems losing sectors outside of this list. It seems that most current hard
drives very rarely loose sectors unless there is a significant defect and the
drive is not going to last much longer. On the other hand I hear that it is not
uncommon for a Seagate drive just to loose a few sectors here and a few sectors
there. It is as if most drive manufactures find the limit of a particular
manufacturing process and then back off of to the point where no data will be
lost under normal use. Then Seagate comes along and tries to push the envelope
a little more than anyone else on a particular process to get a little better
density on those high end SCSI drives. (Higher RPMs usually mean lower
density.) With predictive diagnostics and sector remapping, this shouldn't be
too much of a problem, but I hear not all controllers (like SimBios) properly
handle sector remapping. In a big file server with lots of little files,
occasionally having two files share the same sector and overwriting each other
is not too big of a problem. But when running a large DBMS system with
hundreds, if not thousands of disks, a slip sector can cause many a bad hair
day. (Please take note these are stories that I hear not first hand
experience.)
> On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Walter Luffman wrote:
>
> > 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?
> >
> > Okay, who has horror stories to tell about Seagate and Fujitsu?
>
> I've heard nasty stories about Fujitsu, but I had 2 of them (IDE) in my
> 486, and they outlived the power supply in its tower case. :)
>
> Regarding Seagate, I've had problems with them developing lots of
> badblocks. In the two systems I had functioning as servers w/ seagate
> drives (SCSI) they both began dropping blocks within 1-3 years. One of
> those has a fairly hard-hit RAID w/ 4 IBM drives the array. None of those
> have failed yet (after 3+ years)
>
> All of the new systems I've built in the past year or so (around five)
> have IBM drives now. None of those has had any problems at all, and some
> of them are servers with constant load.
>
> -pete
