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HD Build Quality: Old vs. New

J

jimnms

Gawd
Joined
Mar 15, 2003
Messages
882
I just gutted three old hard drives sitting on my shelf to get the magnets out. One was a 1.2GB WD which didn't work, another was a 3GB WD that worked but had a few bad sectors. The last one was an old Seagate 528MB that still worked with no problems.

At first I didn't want to gut the 528MB drive because it still worked, but I went ahead and did it anyway. Hell I have CF cards for my camera hold more than that HD. :eek:

That old 528MB drive was built like a tank compared to the newer drives. Hard drives today are made out of molded aluminum, with a stamped aluminum top. This old drive is milled out of a solid peice of aluminum. Even the top is milled aluminum and not stamped.

It's also amazing how far HD technology has come. That 528MB drive has 3 platters, that's 176MB per platter, 88MB per side. I remember thinking when I got that 528MB drive that I'd never use that much space. :rolleyes:

I've got a 1GB and 4GB SCSI drives in an old Dell 486 server that I may gut next. They both work, at least the last time I used them they did. That used to be my Linux box several years ago.
 
Data storage is driven by cost, plain and simple, just like the rest of the industry. People don't really care if quality drops, as most will never know what quality means as far as computer equipment goes. All they know is that most stuff occasionally breaks, it just won't happen to them. The tech industry is populated by the most intelligent people, so what could go wrong, right? Besides, if it breaks, computers and computer parts are cheap. They just keep their fingers crossed and hidden behind their back, ironically covered by a shirt they got from Wal-Mart for $5, made in some (Southeast) Asian country and won't last a year before coming apart.

However, none of this is good for the industry. Believe it or not, there is a real threshold at which people suddenly do care about quality. Usually it's around the point where their disk crashes and takes with it very important information, costs them a lot of productivity, or otherwise becomes a major issue in their life for a time. After this they'll spread the word about how terrible computers are and probably won't be too thrilled about buying a new and/or better, higher-quality machine (some might, most won't). Either way, both their and their friends' opinions of the industry drop.
 
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