Re: boot problem, disk mess.. thinking of suicide.

[Bill Hacker <wbh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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walt wrote:

> Bill Hacker wrote:
> 
> 
>>...IBM-Hitachi are again safe to use...
> 
> 
> Hearsay, or personal experience?

Experience. We've had our share of 'Deathstar' - even tracked down one of the 
faults that IBM, AFAIK, never published.

Expect to find an ash-pit about 0.020 inches in diameter in the same spot every 
time on one of the onboard IC's after a local PS power spike... Or HDD power 
cable handling sloppiness/crappy connectors, even...

BUT - we have *also* had many IBM & Hitachi 'Deskstar' run 24 X 7 for five+ 
years vs a 3 yr warranty.  Seagate, OTOH, seems to have perfected the art of 
failing the day after the warranty expires (if one is lucky!).

The much-publicized IBM problems were confined to the electronics (above) - used 
  on many drives, but the electromechanicals and coatings problems applied to a 
far narrower range - most of which we missed owning. And they have been fixed 
anyway.

At the moment, our preference for 3.5" IDE, in descending order is:

- Western Digital (simply for lower power & less heat)

- Hitachi (cheap and cheerful)

- Maxtor (decent performers, but *very hot*)

And Hitachi (only) for SCSI. At least since CDC sold their bird-farm to Seagrate...

OTOH, we have decided to buy no more 3.5" HDD *anyway*.

2.5" are now large enough, fast enough, and reasonably well priced enough to 
allow us to put the redundant arrays into 1U, and on less power, that we now 
need a 2U to hold, power, and cool.

This isn't just 'green' awareness - there is a largish $$ jump in rack rental 
per UPS power budget 'chunk', and all our gear is upstream b/w-limited anyway, 
not HDD speed/capacity limited.

Bill