Crappy HDDs Killing Computers

[jdow]

From: "Roger" <roger at wack.co.za>
> 
> On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 12:38 -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
>> alan wrote:
>> > 
>> > I used to heat my apartment with a 4.2gig Seagate SCSI drive.
> 
> To be honest i really think that Seagate is much much better than
> Maxtor, i think Maxtor is crap, maybe because i have had some really
> rotten luck with Maxtor, from bad sectors to total failure while Seagate
> has been the most reliable for me.

LONG ago I learned the value of backups, particularly live drive
backups. All information that is critical is in multiple places.
Then I decided that was not enough. You might say that these days
I am a RAID evangelist. So far I have not lost anything detectable
to a RAID array. I sweat blood until the RAID is whole again. But
both my partner and I are at zero loss lately thanks to RAID arrays.

(Of course, don't discount the RAID board itself as a potential
error source. Once I nailed it to the Promise card they were VERY
nice about replacing it. But I am ashamed of how long it took me
to figure out that the error, at the same block on 4 drives in
succession, was due to that card and not the drives. I was starting
to get annoyed with the Maxtor failures when they were all in
reality the RAID card. Go figure. Sometimes I am remarkably slow
to figure that sort of thing out. <sigh>)

{^_^}