[Gllug] Life of hard drives

[Rich Walker]

John Edwards <John.Edwards at cornerstonelinux.co.uk> writes:

> On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 12:48:07AM +0000, Tom Taylor wrote:
> > On Thursday 06 March 2003 11:19 pm, Dermot Moynihan wrote:
> > > I bought a Western Digital Caviar 7200RPM 40GB less than 2 years ago from
> > > Simply Computers and it's already making threatening noises.
> > 
> > I bought a Maxtor 40GB 7200 about 18 moths ago, it started showing problems 
> > after 13 months (bad sectors etc), by 15 months it was dead (not even being 
> > detected by bios) ... I think it probably had a clock in it that told it to 
> > die ASAP after the 1 yr waranty ended :-(
> > 
> > If by any chance anyone knows if maxtor actually give 3yr waranties, I'd be 
> > gratfeul for you to tell me, but I very much doubt it (:-( again)
> 
> Up until about 6 months ago Maxtor drives did come with a three year 
> warranty. Returns are to Ireland - go to their website and enter the 
> model & serial number to check the warranty.

There was a big piece on the SCAN website about this when it
happened. Basically, SCSI - pay thru' the nose, get individually-tested
drives, get a long warranty. IDE - very affordable, tested in batches,
short warranty.

Engineering solution: don't buy 1 IDE drive. Buy 2 of the same capacity
from different manufacturers, configure as RAID1, relax.

HTH.

> 
> I suspect that the reduction of warranty on most IDE drives is to 
> reduce future risk from poor quality manufacture or parts - to 
> avoid what happened to Fujitsu when huge numbers of drives failed.

Also, if you want it cheap, you can't complain about it *being* cheap.

cheers, Rich

> 
> IDE drives with 3 years warranties tend to be almost as expensive 
> as SCSI drives now.

-- 
rich walker | technical person | Shadow Robot Company | rw at shadow.org.uk
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