On Thursday 13 February 2003 16:54, David wrote: > yes.. but what about reliability? is there a difference? I need two new > drives, but I much prefer reliability to size (I'm told that size isn't > everything ;-)
Every time I go see the friendly chinese guy down at my local pc shop for a new drive, he sells me a different brand. I asked him about this and he said that the quality of a given brand can vary greatly, because manufacturer A's drives can be made in different places at different times. He sells whatever he thinks is best this week (up to you whether you believe that!). Actually I believe him because there have been long discussions on /. about hard drives, and in the same thread you'll find slashbot A arguing that he swears by brand Foo, whereas slashbot B lost his job, car and girlfriend due to a crashed drive of the same brand. Moral of the story: ASSUME ALL DRIVES ARE CRAP. This is OK, because Linux gives us fantabulous software RAID. If you care about data integrity, get two drives, do mirroring, and the chance of data loss is very, very small. Better yet, get 3, so that you have one on hand when one dies. You should still do backups, of course. Personally I use RH, the installer makes setting up RAID pretty easy, other distros are probably not that hard either. RAID costs more, but I reckon the peace of mind is worth it. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
