[Gllug] recommendation for external hard drive

[Steve Kemp]

On Wed Oct 21, 2009 at 17:19:33 +0100, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:

> I have heard of people who never have problems with Maxtor but I have
> had nothing BUT problems with them. They once delivered 5 pallets of
> Dell machines with Maxtor drives to my workplace and within a week of
> beginning to install them we had to arrange to return the whole lot
> because the out of the box fail rate was so high.

  This is the main problem with all anecdotal stories about drive
 failures.  Over time 99% of drives will fail.  Regardless of model,
 size, or source.

  Ten people see failures in a maxtor drive and immediately scream
 "maxtor suck".  Ten other people see failures in Seagate drives and
 scream "seagate suck".

  Bank on your drive failing eventually - which means you should take
 good backups, and use RAID in situations where you want to keep running
 while a drive is replaced - and you'll be fine.

  I pick drives based on price, availability, and length of warranty
 period.  I think thats about the best you can do.  Any blanket
 statement about specific manufacturers is almost certainly naive
 at best, or outright wrong.

> Also bear in mind they're inherently flaky devices, even the good ones
> can pop at the drop of a hat. Whenever I think about the engineering
> stresses and tolerances involved I'm surprised they work at all!

  See what I mean?

Steve
--
Debian GNU/Linux System Administration
http://www.debian-administration.org/

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