Gotta say i aggree that seagates are prone to bad blocks. But i must mention
a very unpleasant experience i had when working as a technician in a computer
shop. Of a batch ( not shipped as a batch...just a big order) of around 40 WD
drives of varying sizes , about 15 came back. problems were primarily motor
related with non-spin ups and truly musical howling noises a speciality. One
drive came in with its heads roaming free as if they had broken free of their
tether/spring/whatever usually prevens free-roaming-head-syndrome, it was
also quite unaccesable, perhaps part of the head mechanisim had gone AWOL and
scraped the hell out of the write surface. One other came out of the box and
never even made a sound....totally stillborn.
It is worth poiting out that the boss, who had been there a lot longer than
me , remarked that she had never seen this kind of thing from WD before.
Me?, i stick with quantum, maxtor and a fujitsu i was given that seems pretty
ageless despite being a gamers main drive for several years:)
On Tuesday 01 May 2001 01:56, Jay DeKing wrote:
> My experience with Seagate, while not exactly recent, soured me on them
> forever. In the early 90's I had many Seagate drives, all of which
> developed bad blocks at an alarming rate. Since then I have used WD
> almost exclusively; not once in the last 5 years have I had even one bad
> block. I still have some of the old WD drives, ranging from 280MB to
> 1.2GB. They all work fine, but are much too small for my purposes. At
> this time I have one 30GB WD, a 30GB Maxtor, and a 40GB Maxtor all in
> the same box and they're running just fine. The WD is on a different IDE
> port than the Maxtors, though, just to be safe.
>
> Jay DeKing
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [expert] hard drive experiences (was 8.0 final --brakes
> MANY applications (Software Installeris first on that list))
> Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 00:17:36 +0000
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> 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
