Is there a brand that doesn't fail?

[LstBrunnenG]

I'm typing this on a system with two Hitachi deskstars that are about to go the way of the dodo (okay, one is, but would you still trust the other?

I've had Western Digital drives fail on my mom and several friends, but thankfully not on myself.

I had a Maxtor 40 GBer, and it died after two years of service as a storage drive.

What's left? Seagate? Is there something I'm doing wrong or should I just stop christening hard drives by giving them a bath? (mind you that one of the WDs died before I arrived on the scene, hadn't touched it before in my life, so it can't all be me).

 

[Ice Czar]

http://www.seagate.com/training/ata/unit3/mt1p1.html
(not Firefox compliant)

size of human hair 76 microns
fly hieght of a HDD's head 2 microns

Head Slap

"Head slap is when the actuator arm/read-write assembly impacts the platter due to a shock such as a tip-over, a tap with a screwdriver, or an overly aggressive shove to get the drive into a bay. This can also occur if you try to scoot the box across your desk while it is running

As a result of the impact, tiny indentations can be formed. The material ejected from this impact is scattered about the disc, and when the drive is powered up the heads will pass over this indentation and the ejected material. This can be the equivalent of running over a bowling ball in a go-cart traveling at Mach 813."

from the seagate link above

 

[Craz]

I just got myself a Seagate after having both Western Digital and Maxtor drives fail on me a few times. I picked up a Seagate 200GB SATA 7200RPM drive and although it isn't the fastest thing out there I love the amount of space I can play with. Seagate drives also carry a 5 year warranty so you'll be sure to be covered if something goes wrong. If anything will it's sure to happen within five years of ownership. I would love to have the Seagate as a storage drive and pickup a 74GB Raptor to use as my OS drive. The Brother in Arms level load times are brutal!

 

[LstBrunnenG]

When handling your new Seagate disc drive, please follow these precautions:

Do not drop or jar the drive.
Keep the drive in the protective anti-static container until ready to install.
Protect the drive from static discharge by wearing a grounded wrist strap.
Handle the drive by the edges of the frame.
Do not apply pressure or attach labels to the circuit board or the top cover of the drive.
Turn off the power to the host system during installation.

Alright I pretty much do all those, but who *actually* wears those static wrist straps? Be honest...

 

[Order]

Go SCSI.

 

[Ice Czar]

Alright I pretty much do all those, but who *actually* wears those static wrist straps? Be honest...

I'll give you three guesses and the first two dont count

Its been awhile since I posted my ESD rant
and since im now the mod of Power supplies...
It is a power issue, more or less, its certainly related
first up

ESD Precautions and Practices
The ATX motherboard specification maintains +5VSB power to the motherboard
unlike PC/XT, AT, Baby AT and LPX form factors that employed a manual switch to turn on the power to the motherboard, the ATX form factor employs a "soft power" scheme
allowing software control of power, allowing the OS or other ap to turn the computer off, it also allows wake on LAN or Wake on WAN. Since there is a low level of power supplied to the board at all times, you need to address this whenever your swapping out components

the ideal solution is to unplug the power supply from the socket then ground the case with an alligator clip to a seperate ground point and use a wristrap to ground you

the alternative method is to turn off the PSU with its own switch
reliable only if the board has a 5VSB LED indicator on it
at which point you know the board is unpowered, yet the case is still grounded via the AC Socket

the alternative method if there is no switch on the PSU and LED mobo power indicator is to unplug the PSU from the wall socket, then disconnect the main power connector and plug the PSU back into the AC Socket, where once again you have the case grounded

keep in mind that typically the PSU physically contacts the case with a metal to metal contact, at least in the past, and would have at least some contact via the screws, but these adys with painted cases and supplies, some augment that with a grounding strap for the PSU itself (very typical in server supplies where they take no chances with contact)

and religously touch a bare metal surface in the case to ground yourself when swapping componets (this is very typical in here with enthusiasts)
but all in all wristraps are cheap and so are alligator clips and a bit o wire
a grounded work pad is also a good investment, as is being aware of how large a role the lack of humidity has in ESD events, especially in Winter when hot air heating desiccates the moisture out of the air

(see I live on the Rocky Mountain High Dessert Plateau, where its already dry and in Winter with central home heating I humidify the environment when working on components)

ESD Reference
http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r10/bombay/news2/story11.htm
"According to (not so) recent studies conducted by the AT & T Bell labs, 25 % of all component failures today are related to E.S.D and out of all defective components that arrive 50%are damaged by E.S.D. the annual damage due to these failures is estimated at 25 Billion dollars"

An Integrated Circuit (IC) consists of several transistors fabricated on one chip. Due to the advances in L.S.I and V.L.S.I thousands of transistors are crowded on a single chip. By decreasing the thickness of the gate oxides and interconnecting lines the manufacturers hope to achieve much higher speeds at very low power consumption. But under these conditions if the Electrostatic Discharge passes through an IC and the current that results is not diverted or diminished by a suitable protective mechanism, the discharge may raise the temperature of the junction inside the component to melting point which will cause damage to the junction or interconnecting lines. Since surface mount devices are smaller than conventional ICs they are even more susceptible to E.S.D damage. E.S.D causes two main types of failures: -

1. Immediate failure where the effect can be readily seen by the equipment manufacturer.

2. Delayed failure where the device is damaged only upto the point where it may pass quality control tests, but wears out sooner than its rated time


http://www.esda.org/esdbasics1.htm

Table 2
Examples of Static Generation
Typical Voltage Levels

Means of Generation .........10-25% RH ......65-90% RH
Walking across carpet ......,35,000V ...........1,500V
Walking across vinyl tile ....12,000V ............250V
Worker at bench ................6,000V .............100V
Chair with urethane foam ..18,000V ...........1,500V

ESD Damage—How Devices Fail
Electrostatic damage to electronic devices can occur at any point from manufacture to field service. Damage results from handling the devices in uncontrolled surroundings or when poor ESD control practices are used. Generally damage is classified as either a catastrophic failure or a latent defect.

Catastrophic Failure
When an electronic device is exposed to an ESD event it may no longer function. The ESD event may have caused a metal melt, junction breakdown, or oxide failure. The device's circuitry is permanently damaged causing the device fail. Such failures usually can be detected when the device is tested before shipment. If the ESD event occurs after test, the damage will go undetected until the device fails in operation.

Latent Defect
A latent defect, on the other hand, is more difficult to identify. A device that is exposed to an ESD event may be partially degraded, yet continue to perform its intended function. However, the operating life of the device may be reduced dramatically. A product or system incorporating devices with latent defects may experience premature failure after the user places them in service. Such failures are usually costly to repair and in some applications may create personnel hazards.

It is relatively easy with the proper equipment to confirm that a device has experienced catastrophic failure. Basic performance tests will substantiate device damage. However, latent defects are extremely difficult to prove or detect using current technology, especially after the device is assembled into a finished product.


Static Electricity - Electrostatic Discharge (ESD)

"Most books or articles indicate that a spark can't be seen until the voltage on your body reaches between 450 to 750 VDC. Others indicate that they are very hard to notice until it reaches 1000 VDC. For most people, to feel a shock from a static electricity discharge the voltage is between 2,000-4,000V. A 0.5mm arch of static electricity carries approximately 2850V."

Semiconductor Electromigration In-Depth

Ground that mat, wriststrap and if possible humidify the environment

when handling components, avoid touching any chips, circuitry and the slot contact fingers, hold PCB boards by the edges wherever possible



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Originally posted by SB22
. As long as you didn't feel any sort of "shoch" between you and your equipment, you should be fine.

ESD Susceptibility Analysis

"ESD votages sufficient to damage semiconductor devices are often lower than the threshold of human sensory perception, making a person unaware that a static discharge has taken place"

Originally posted by Deadlierchair
Wow, good post Ice Czar...but to not be totally anal about all of those things, would it be pretty much safe to touch stuff if I touch the metal on my case while it is off, but still plugged in and grounded?

thats the basic proceedure most employ, its best if you do that like every other move, and be aware of exactly how much RH (Relative Humidity) influences Static Discharge
Taking great care to never touch any chip or lead, handling only the PCB, perferably by the edges.

the other point of my post is that while the immediate cause and effect relationship of catastrophic failure, using the "typical" proceedure is low...

This board is filled every day with people who have developed RAM errors, data corruption problems (generally RAM) ect, Most of which can be traced to either poor power regulation (Transient Response) of the PSU, or ESD

Latent defects caused by ESD in any IC (and they are just everywhere from HDDs to NIC, CPU, RAM ect) are massively underated as a cause of problems. If you have eliminated power fluctuation problems (PSU voltage regulation and power conditioning) and still experience a component failure, odds are that it was a latent defect, either from installation, or one that wasnt caught during manufacturing.
the membership displays a cavalier attitude towards this issue for 2 reasons, RMA's are pretty easy, and they rarely employ the same component for its fully rated lifespan, upgrading before the eventual premature failure becomes appearent.

But
a latent defect, not only effects the lifespan, it degrades the performance of the IC as well, and is often the difference between the "Golden Chip" benchmark leader, the norm, and "why cant I get the same OC as this guy? Ive got the same components"

Part 1 of the > ESD & Electromigration rant
wrist straps are cheap as is assembling a grounding station (pad seperate ground clips)
humidifying your work area is more advanced
youd be suprised how paranoid a $500 mobo and a few thousand in RAM will make you

 

[defakto]

There are no manufatctures that have drives that don't die. Drives are mechanical parts, mechanical parts fail.

 

[tdg]

Try out Seagates, they're the only IDE/ATA drives I use myself and in customer builds, and most of my SCSI drives are Seagates as well. Have never had one fail on me, even my 32 megabyte Seagate from 1992 still works fine

 

[[H]appymeal]

I've found older drives to be many times more reliable then modern ones. Not that is helps you at all.

I've been using a 7.8GB 7200 IBM drive produced in 1998-Aug in my gaming computer to run the OS, well since dec-1998 (When I got the computer).
I keep my games&pagefile loaded on a 40GB 7200 WD from several years ago.

Haven't had a problem or dead sector yet o_0 [Yea, I know Im pushing my luck]

While I've had 3 IBM deathstars, and 2 maxtors (the most recent 1 from a 15months ago) die on me while being used in less strenuous situations).

 

[unhappy_mage]

Is there a brand that doesn't fail?

No. Of course not. What kind of a dumb question is that?

 

[Ice Czar]

No. Of course not. What kind of a dumb question is that?

the not so dumb kind actually

SSD have an extremely low failure rate
since they arent mechanical
they happen to be astronomically priced however

in a mechanical HDD, one of the design factors that can make a drive more robust is the platter size, for instance that why you only see 2.5" form factor drives in laptops

and Seagate has started making 2.5" enterprise drives, in an effort to get greater rackmount density, theyd likely benefit from the reduced platter size as well

enterprise drives also dont typically go through as amny power cycles
and thus less thermal stress as well, controlled environment ect

we try to avoid using "dumb" around here

 

[unhappy_mage]

SSD have an extremely low failure rate
since they arent mechanical
they happen to be astronomically priced however
<snip>
we try to avoid using "dumb" around here

Well, yes, but I figured he wanted to keep the price of his computer less than the price of his car/house. My bad on the word usage, just it seems like a ridiculous question to ask. "Is there a brand that DOES NOT fail?" How about "low failure rate"?

OT: Your posts always sound to me like they belong in a haiku. Very peaceful.

 

[Ice Czar]

same reasons I didnt post about Solid State Disks in my first post

 

[corrosive23]

Ill never use maxtor, they have always been shit to me and everyone ive ever owned, or that was owned by someone i know, has died withen a year.

 

[demons9872]

go get some of those flash cards they wont die theres nothing mechanical

 

[LstBrunnenG]

go get some of those flash cards they wont die theres nothing mechanical

Show me a 300 GB flash card with i/o times that rival a hard drive's. Love the idea, but it's a bit impractical...

No. Of course not. What kind of a dumb question is that?

I assume you took the part about me washing my hard drives in water literally too?

 

[LstBrunnenG]

Okay sorry for the double post but I got a question.

Say I order one of these from the great and mighty egg:

http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148064

Would I be able to take a ghost of my existing configuration (2x80 GB in Raid0) and restore it to that hard drive? And then image that later and restore it to a raid0 of that and an identical drive later?

I haven't reinstalled in a long time, everything's been stable and the thought of doing everything again just has me going bleh....

Edit: and yes czar I'll get one of these as well

http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16899888207

 

[Vertigo Acid]

Also, another thing to ask yourself would be, "why am I killing all of these hard drives?"
My first thought is inadaquite power supply. Might want to check out that before you go killing another dozen drives. As for reliability, I've had all manner of drives fail; Seagates SCSI drives that are built like a tank die, and also cheapass Maxtor DM8s which are built like shit. Either way, you can't just group a whole brand into catagories of reliability. Hitachi's current drives hold up great compared to the Deathstars of yesteryear! Head over to Storagereview.com, they have a reliability database that you might find useful

 

[LstBrunnenG]

Don't worry, most of these hard drives that have died did not do so in my case and thus not with my PSU. Only HD that's ever died in here was some old Maxtor that was loud and annoying anyway.

 

[Ice Czar]

..

Edit: and yes czar I'll get one of these as well

http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16899888207

think for starters youd want one with an alligator clip on the end of it
that one requires a "snap station" to ground to, so its not a complete out of the box kit.
with the alligator clip, you can ground the case (per instructions above) and attach to it

Show me a 300 GB flash card with i/o times that rival a hard drive's. Love the idea, but it's a bit impractical...

I will but only if you assure me your health insurance premium are paid up first
We'll put the paramedics on standby for the sticker shock heart attack

when you say they died out of your box
where these in transported external enclosures offsite?

 

[gerbiaNem]

Seagate usually has a good rep, but I just had two of them die on me in the past 2mo. So nothing is failsafe.

 

[LstBrunnenG]

when you say they died out of your box
where these in transported external enclosures offsite?

They died out of my box because they were in other boxen.

Okay, I read the ANSWERS sticky in this forum, and it said that one reason my drive could be clicking is because of bad cables. So I went to CompUSSR and bought two new SATA cables, because my old ones had been through some rather odd incident with a melting LED wire, and one of them had a cracked connector which may have been causing intermittent disconnects (it's worked for a while though...).

I also had recently installed replacement LEDs, but I had had them on the same molex as my molex -> 2x SATA cable. I changed it around so that the LEDs are now sharing with the video card and the HDs have their own molex.

I ran a chkdsk with the /r option. It found no errors.

What my drives were doing was making these horribly loud clicking noises and then locking up windows. At one point it wouldn't even boot, but now things are looking rather smooth....

Should I trust them? I have most of my documents backed up, but if they fail without warning I could stand to lose a significant (60 GB) collection of movies. I could back them up if given time/warning but it would take time because there aren't any hard drives in the house that could handle that and I'd need to burn it to DVD+Rs.

Edit: I also ran Hitachi's diagnostic utility. No errors generated, even on the advanced scans.

 

[Ice Czar]

well in the Corruption 101 at the end is an ap under integrity checking
ATACT, Id let that run for overnight and look for any errors

of course Ive never set it up to run on an SATA drive and my instructions only cover IDE channels, so you'll need to wade into its help file

intermittent powr or data connectivity can certainly explain more clicking
a click is the drive recalibrating because of a seek miss
the drive is constantly recalibarting on the fly for thermal changes, things heat up they grow bigger, and with the areal density of the bits so high even minor changes in physical dimensions impacts the geometry of "locations" drives typically use distributed servo bursts thses days, little bits of "markers" interspersed with the data (when the low level formatting is done at the factory) so when you have intermittent power of data connectivity alot of misses occur and you get recalibrations, of course the same is true if there has been head slap and debris is on the track and the head running over it.

some clicking is normal, but an increasing frequency of clicking is very bad
the click of death being an endless loop where the drive is unable to locate it position and constantly recalibrates

personally "trust" is tied to a time period of stable operation, the longer the more trust you gain, you now have physicl control of the environment and with care can assure no further stress is placed on the drive (impact, temperature, vibration, power) so the longer it works reliably the higher your confidence in it will be, if it doesnt fail within the next month and proper care is exersiced it will likely last near its warranty period.

One of the things I always tell clients when I make house calls is for them to get that computer up off the floor (but somewhere still cool) and away from the inadvertant bump while the HDD is spinning, in many ways the HDDs is the single most sensative device in your box, its certainly the most sophisticated mechanical one.

 

[Unabomber]

Different manufacturers will turn out bad batches of drives at different times. One company's batch of products that are just fine now, might end up having high rates of defects in another batch. The crown of quality and reliability has shuffled from IBM / Hitachi (until the Deathstar fiasco), to Western Digital, to Seagate regularly.

Now, that being said, there were some companies that produced simply awful drives from the start. How many of you remember the Champion / Palladium line of IDE hard drives?

 

[LoneWolf]

Now, that being said, there were some companies that produced simply awful drives from the start. How many of you remember the Champion / Palladium line of IDE hard drives?

I could go back further than that. Remember Kalok? They were using stepper motors on their IDE drives long after everyone else had switched to voice coil actuators. Every one of their drives I came in contact with (most were 40-80MB) ran about 20 degrees hotter than everyone else's, had horrible seek times, head alignment problems, and went bad extremely fast. You could run one for a few hours, and it would get hot and develop bad sectors. Turn the system off, cool the drive down (i.e. refrigerator), plug it back in, format it out, and most, if not all of the bad sectors might disappear until the drive heated up again. (shudder). Apparently from what I have read, the company became JTS, who made the Champion drives you mention. I remember encountering a few of those too; they were better than Kalok, but that's not saying much, they still had a higher rate of failure than they ever should have. Fortunately the company had the decency to die out.

EDIT: For fun and nostalgia: http://www.redhill.net.au/id.html

Man, does that ever take me back.

 

[neo86]

I still have a 3gb 4200 rpm drive running from '96... And it was produced by... IBM!!!

 

[dano1122]

buy 2 quiet drives with long warranties and run them raid-1 with a nightly incremental back-up to an external drive, RMA as needed. simple as that?

 

[Ice Czar]

buy 2 quiet drives with long warranties and run them raid-1 with a nightly incremental back-up to an external drive, RMA as needed. simple as that?

with an additional off-site incremental & full set yes
unless Iron Mountain misplaces the tapes and you have to fess up to 60,000 customers youve lost their records

 

[killerD]

Different manufacturers will turn out bad batches of drives at different times. One company's batch of products that are just fine now, might end up having high rates of defects in another batch. The crown of quality and reliability has shuffled from IBM / Hitachi (until the Deathstar fiasco), to Western Digital, to Seagate regularly.

Now, that being said, there were some companies that produced simply awful drives from the start. How many of you remember the Champion / Palladium line of IDE hard drives?

Couldnt have said it better, this should be a sticky. All drives are manufactured with nearly identical processes and parts. In the past year Seagate and Western Digital have had the lowest warranty claims (and have enjoyed the majority of OEM wins), with Maxtor being the highest, but this could change in a year. The best thing to do is make sure you get at least a 3 year warranty on the drive which most do offer.

 

[Ice Czar]

SR FAQ: Which Brand of Hard Drive is Most Reliable? by e_dawg

With the exception of a few models with outright design problems (the IBM 75GXP for one) or the odd bad batch, most hard drives from all manufacturers are similar in reliability when they leave the factory. There is no point saying Maxtor is more reliable than WD or Seagate is more reliable than Maxtor unless you have used hundreds of hard drives and have a sufficient sample to draw from. Most people drawing on their experience with a dozen drives will come to a completely biased conclusion because their sample is not even remotely representative of the population.

The most common cause of HD failures is mishandling/abuse during shipping/storage and integration (*1). If you think about it, there are so many opportunities for this kind of mishandling/abuse to take place once a drive leaves the factory: shipping/sorting from the factory to national distributors, storage/handling at the national depot, shipping/sorting to local distributors, storage/handling at the local distributors, shipping/sorting to the retailers, storage/handling at the retailers, handling/integration by the retailer or consumer.

If you have ever seen couriers playing soccer with your packages, you will know how shipping can damage a drive. If you have ever seen packages tumble down conveyor belts into sorting bins at a courier's sorting facility, you will know how sorting can damage a drive. If you have ever seen how some distributors and retailers pour drives out of a box onto a table and stack them 20 high on top of each other, you will know how handling at the distributor/retail level can damage a drive. If you have ever seen how some people install drives into a PC, you will know how integration can damage a drive.

It is not right to say Brand X drives are unreliable because the vast majority (>99% usually) of hard drives from any manufacturer leave the factory in a perfectly reliable state. If you want to blame people, look at the rest of the marketing channel downstream from the HD manufacturer. Of course, if a particular brand of drive is consistently unreliable in your area, it could be symptomatic of a careless distributor or shipping company that deals exclusively with that brand of drive — I guess the only solution would be to avoid buying that brand of drive. But to broadcast it on the Net that this brand of drive is unreliable is misleading.

-I forgot to add this point: (Sep 25/03)

(*1) That said, non-operating shock tolerance could be a determining factor in the reliability of a drive because it may allow the drive to survive indelicate handling by couriers, distributors, retailers, and consumers. It follows, then, that FDB equipped drives, which generally increase the non-operating shock tolerance of a drive, are potentially more reliable than their ball bearing equipped counterparts.

my addendum

some manufacturers have a much better distribution channel, better packaging, better education in channel and a lack of retail brick & mortar accessable to the fumble fingered public final sale location. (read seagate) I avoid brick & mortar HDDs


It always comes down to the weakest link in the chain, often if you have a problem with a brand its likely who your buying from and how its getting to you.

I'll see if I can get jonnyGURU to drop by an regale you with a few horror stories

 

[Monkey34]

My personal experiece keeps me from buying another Maxtor. It may or may not be indicative of the brand as a whole, so make your own call. JMO.

 

[jonnyGURU]

It always comes down to the weakest link in the chain, often if you have a problem with a brand its likely who your buying from and how its getting to you.

I'll see if I can get jonnyGURU to drop by an regale you with a few horror stories

All I can add is... yep!

Most hard drives don't fail very often. Most hard drives aren't packaged well when they get to the distributor, and are packaged even WORSE when they get to the VAR. By the time they get to Joe Enduser, the drive is shot.

CURRENTLY my failure rate is less than 1% on most drives. But when I worked for TCWO, we bought direct from the channel, but the drive would go through the receiving department and a couple warehouse hands... usually the drive was dropped, THROWN into a box or set down not-so-gently onto a work-bench, so my failure rate was higher. When I worked for ASI, they'd put them in shipping boxes stacked on top of each other with no padding in between! Just foam peanuts around the outside of the box!

That's why I don't buy onesis twosies hard drives from MA Labs. They can't pack worth a crap. Only when I order a complete case of 20 do I get properly packaged hard drives from them. So think about it... You bought that drive from a VAR, that got it from a distributor that got it from the manufacturer. It might have been packed well when YOU received it, but....

Right now, my drives are coming straight from SED (a distributor) to me. So far, so good. No receiving department, no warehouse staff. I open the box and install the drive. I'm a happy camper.

 

[unhappy_mage]

I'm a happy camper.

Friggin' campers.

Sorry, too much Quake.

I second the idea that it depends where you get the drives and what route they take to you. We bought a set of 30 27gb WD disks (in machines) and we had about 15 of these disks die over two years. Not a great track record.

On the other hand, we bought a bunch (another 30) of 13gb IBM disks from another company, and we've only had 1 failure in 4 years since then. Shipping is everything. I've heard good things about zipzoomfly as opposed to newegg, but I haven't had a disk die from either place.

 

[LoneWolf]

When I built for a mom-n-pop, I have to say those early Deskstars (1.7GB up to 14GB) were some of the best drives available for reliability and performance. Not every Deskstar is a "DeathStar"; just the 75GXP models, and perhaps the occasional 60GXP, though it was isolated. It's too bad IBM screwed up so badly, up until then they were my first choice.

Western Digital worked well for us with the exception of the occasional model having troubles. Conner Peripherals was average, and their drives were also slow; we attempted to avoid ordering them. Seagate's high-end IDE's were always great, but some models from their Decathlon line had some issues. Maxtor was average, then went way downhill around the time of their bankruptcy; some people swear by them now, though I'd consider them average for reliability. I actually had a good Maxtor (850GB if I recall) go bad in one of my own systems just by removing it from my case (gently) when doing an upgrade; the drive went from just fine one second to scores of bad sectors the next, fortunately I had already cloned it. The Maxtor tech for RMA support was very friendly, and told me they had had that happen on occasion as he set up the RMA, frankly it scared me.

For SATA now, I use Seagate exclusively. For IDE, I'll use either Seagate or WD; I've had good reliability rates with both. I haven't had a WD drive go bad in a long time (I think the last one was a 20GB), and I've never had one of the current 8MB Caviar SE drives fail.

 

[jonnyGURU]

Whoa.

Connor. Decathalon.

I feel old.

I'm glad you didn't bust out with JTS and Quantum Fireball in your post.

 

[LoneWolf]

Whoa.

Connor. Decathalon.

I feel old.

I'm glad you didn't bust out with JTS and Quantum Fireball in your post.

Oh...I've got another few up my sleeve...Muahahahahaha....

KALOK!!! Miniscribe! Micropolis!!!

(Watches JohnnyGURU flee in terror...)

 

[Monkey34]

Heh.....I've got a couple of fireballs and a connor sitting on MY shelf too. Should we open a museum?

 

[jonnyGURU]

Oh...I've got another few up my sleeve...Muahahahahaha....

KALOK!!! Miniscribe! Micropolis!!!

(Watches JohnnyGURU flee in terror...)

AAAAARGH!!!

Micropolis. Remember how HUGE those SCS drives were?!? They were bigger than MFM drives of the early 80's!

 

[unhappy_mage]

I took apart a huge 5.25" drive we had in the basement. Huge friggin magnets in that thing. Very useful for picking up all the nails/screws lying around the workshop...

 

[HighwayAssassins]

I've only ever had maxtors, none ever failed...they get my seal of approval.