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Hardware

3 Major HD Makers Recalling Drives? [UPDATED] 419

Posted by CmdrTaco from the backup-the-pr0n dept.
mauriceh writes "Seems that 3 major Hard Disk companies have a problem with defective 40GB platters. A major recall is in the works." Seagate, Hitachi, and Maxtor 40 & 80 gig drives appear to be the troubled drives. Update: 05/30 12:37 GMT by M : There is apparently no recall. Digitimes has issued a revision/retraction, and TheInquirer has a story as well.
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3 Major HD Makers Recalling Drives? [UPDATED] More

3 Major HD Makers Recalling Drives? [UPDATED]

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  • Or maybe they were using said HD.

  • *sigh* (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dumb Nig ( 676922 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:03PM (#6071365)
    'Tis the problem with faster and bigger drives.
    I mean, a one year waranty nowadays, It's a joke.

    Now I'm off to back up my data because my drive will probably fail soon.

    • Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Heh, thermal paper receipts disintigrate in 6 months.

      So, scan one in, edit it, and use that to get maxtor to send you a new one. If the decline it, sue the store in small claims court.

      Maxtor has been good but this 1 year warranty bullshit makes them no better than Fangtun.

    • Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Informative)

      by Blkdeath ( 530393 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @09:31PM (#6073226) Homepage
      'Tis the problem with faster and bigger drives.
      I mean, a one year waranty nowadays, It's a joke.

      You should look into the Western Digital Special Edition drives. 8MB cache, fast as snot (Western Digitals seem to be kicking the rat dander out of most every other ATA drive manufacture nowadays, with or without the cache boost), and best of all, three year warranty!

      40GB Western Digital Special Edition drive == $116CDN. The full warranty makes them a steal.

      Speaking of fiascos {cough} Remember that Fujitsu fiasco not so long ago? Yeah yeah, we're still getting them in (two today alone). See, it's a lot easier selling these 40GB drives at $116 when people are able to RMA their 20GB Fujitsu and get a $118 cheque in return. Costs them all of $12 for a box, packing material, and shipping costs. So a brand-new drive with warranty costs them a whopping $10.

      The sad part, however, is that I've had so much practice I've become good at telling customers their data is gone. {sigh}

  • DEAR GOD (Score:5, Funny)

    by randomdef ( 663725 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:04PM (#6071370)
    WONT SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE PORN? all those hours i spent....er...downloading...

  • Slashdoted? (Score:4, Informative)

    by www.microsoft.com ( 671608 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:04PM (#6071371) Homepage
    Major brand hard drive vendors recall defective products produced in China

    Jimmy Hsu, Taipei; Wen-Yu Lang, DigiTimes.com [Tuesday 27 May 2003]

    Three major brand hard drive vendors - Seagate Technology, Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - have started recalling some of their 40GB and 80GB products sold in Taiwan due to similar defects identified in the products, Taiwanese channel distributors said.

    About 12,000-15,000 defective hard drives are estimated to have entered Taiwan. It is unclear whether the same groups of products, with an estimated defect rate of 10%, have also been marketed in other parts of the world, sources said.

    Local distributors said they began to see soaring return rates on the hard drives since late April. Most of the returned drives reportedly suffered from bad sectors or problems being formatted, and were found to have come from the same sources in China.

    Among the top four hard drive vendors worldwide, Western Digital is the only one unaffected by the incident, as the company does not have products manufactured in China, sources said.

    It is suspected that high defect rate was caused by the inexperience of certain manufacturers in China as they were transitioning to new production processes, sources said.

    Local agents declined to confirm the report. While Maxtor agent Xander International denied seeing an unusual defect rate, Seagate agents Synnex Technology International and Taiwan Aries stressed that customers would be provided with complete warranty services if they were sold defective products. Comments from Hitachi were unavailable.

  • Seagate refutes this (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bluegreenone ( 526698 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:06PM (#6071396) Homepage
    The Register actually had an article on this in which Seagate denied this story. [theregister.co.uk] It does seem odd that 3 manufacturers would be having the same problem.
    • Well, it seems that WD escaped trouble this time! Glad I've got a coupla WD drives in my box.

      Wait - where's that smoke coming from? Aw, fuck.

      Make that 4 hard drive manufacturers.

      • Re:Glad it's only 3 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Nogami_Saeko ( 466595 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @06:36PM (#6072134)
        I just had a WD800JB blow up a few weeks ago with bad sectors - corrupted my system drive so I had to reformat and reinstall, at which point the drive started spinning down/spinning up at random times and locking up the machine.

        Got a replacement from WD (which was a refurbished drive and makes "clicking" sounds occasionally.

        Took it out of my system and replaced it with a Maxtor 120gb which is quieter, faster and of course, bigger.

        The 80gb refurbished drive is now in an external firewire case as a data transport drive.

        I was less than impressed getting a refurbished drive back from WD on a drive that's less than 6 months old - I'm sticking to Maxtor / Seagate from now on.

        N.

        • Re:Glad it's only 3 (Score:3, Informative)

          by 13Echo ( 209846 )
          I've had Maxtor do the same thing. Then I switched to IBM. Then, two weeks ago, one of my 3 40GB IBM60GXP drives puked out. IBM/Hitachi's RMA process blows compared to Maxtor. Maxtor's replacement has the least hassle of all of them. They'll ship you a drive via next-day air, and you can send your old one back in the box they sent; prepaid. Hitachi doesn't seem interested in that kind of thing. Oh well. I won't buy from them.

    • Makes perfect sense... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sterno ( 16320 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:30PM (#6071633) Homepage
      In all likelyhood, all three of those drive companies are buying their platters from the same vendor. They may all take those drives and put them together separately, but it's not unusualy for competing vendors to source parts from the same company.

  • Just as I suspected (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Michael's a Jerk! ( 668185 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:06PM (#6071398) Homepage Journal
    The warrenties being lowered was a sign quality as dropping. Data densitites are so huge these these days. The question of Drive reliability [slashdot.org] has been asked before. It's good reading.

    • Re:Just as I suspected (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis&gmail,com> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:09PM (#6071436) Homepage
      What's worse though is with this quick "progress" you can't buy those more rugged 10/20 GB drives any more that seem to last forever...

      Yeah progress!

      Tom

      • Re:Just as I suspected (Score:5, Interesting)

        by wwwillem ( 253720 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:27PM (#6071609) Homepage
        you can't buy those more rugged 10/20 GB drives any more

        After spending last weekend trying to salvage stuff from my 9 month old 80GB IBM drive that went into coma, I can only 800% agree with you.... But if you (and I) think that ruggedness is more important than performance or "buck per giga", maybe we better look at SCSI drives. I've couple of those Fujitsu 4GB drives around that could function as a boat anchor. Real engineering stuff.

        On the other hand, I'm very afraid some /.-ers will quickly point out that today's SCSI drives are as much crap as the IDE ones :-(. But it's an avenue worth exploring....

        • SCSI versus IDE (Score:5, Insightful)

          by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @06:03PM (#6071882) Homepage Journal
          On the other hand, I'm very afraid some /.-ers will quickly point out that today's SCSI drives are as much crap as the IDE ones :-(.
          Well, I don't have any numbers or even anecdotes. But if all these drives are failing because of defective platters, then what interface standard the drive uses wouldn't make much difference.

          On the other hand, if it's just a matter of quality control, then it's not suprising if SCSI is more reliable. Except for a few hardware snobs that refuse to run IDE, SCSI is purchased by people who need sustained throughput: servers, developers who do a lot of builds, render farms, that sort of thing. These customers are going to pay more attention to failure rates than IDE customers, who tend to be end users. Once something becomes a consumer technology, manufacturers assume that bad units will just get returned, and don't worry about failure unless and until the failure rate gets too expensive.

          Customer satisifaction? Get real. Most people assume that when their computer breaks, its because they did something wrong.

          And hey, why do people buy IDE drives? Because they're cheaper than SCSI. And here's one reason why!

        • Re:Just as I suspected (Score:3, Interesting)

          by loconet ( 415875 )
          I've couple of those Fujitsu 4GB drives around that could function as a boat anchor. Real engineering stuff.

          So true, I've had 2 Fujitsus HDs, 5GB and 3GB that I use every day , day in and day out, heavy trashing, Windows and Linux. They are still serving me well.

          *knock on wood*

        • Re:Just as I suspected (Score:5, Informative)

          by tnak ( 163802 ) <mlibbyNO@SPAM4geekscomputing.com> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @08:46PM (#6072953) Homepage
          Warranty on seagate ide drive == 1 year

          warranty on seagate scsi drive == 5 years.

          Looks to me like seagate believes they're better drives.

          Samsung still has 3 year warranties on their ide drives. Only one I'l buy from now.

        • Well, you can easily get SCSI drives with 5-year warranties, whiel it's getting to be almost impossible to get an IDE drive with more than 1 year backing it up.

          Companies wouldn't be willing to warrant things for that long if they weren't darn sure they wouldn't lose money in the process - and returns are very expensive.
    • the lowered warranties are not a sign of dropped quality. It's foolish to think that. My big Western Digital hasn't seen so much as one problem, and I don't expect it to for many years

      • Re:Just as I suspected (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:34PM (#6071680) Journal
        the lowered warranties are not a sign of dropped quality. It's foolish to think that. My big Western Digital hasn't seen so much as one problem, and I don't expect it to for many years

        Really? Strange that the beancounters from *all* the major HD makers seem to think otherwise. Otherwise at least *one* of them would simply stick to three year warranty and VERY LOUDLY publicise the fact.

        They've all done the sums and if it's more cost effective to manufacture (slightly) defective parts with a reduced warranty, well, they're right onto it.

        All I want is a drive bigger than 40GB that'll actually *last* 5 years. Is that so hard? Apparently yes. I've got 80MB drives that are thirteen years old and still get run 8hrs a day. I don't think I'll ever see that of the new, 1 year warranty drives.

        • oh, how bout Western Digital. I bought mine and it came with a Three Year warranty.
          • I've a 6 month old 40GB WD drive and it's developing unrecoverable read errors on sectors already :-(.

            As far as I'm concerned , big drives are good for the "Wow!" factor, but are pretty much useless for serious data storage work. What's the point of having all that space if the damn thing dies 6 months down the track? Hard drives have to be pretty much the last "unreliable" bit of gear there is in a PC.

            Increasing areal density just to get the "Wow!" factor doesn't help their reputation one bit when the er
        • I've got 80MB drives that are thirteen years old and still get run 8hrs a day

          One word. Upgrade.

        • They've all done the sums and if it's more cost effective to manufacture (slightly) defective parts with a reduced warranty, well, they're right onto it.

          Oh, come on. It's not even in the financial interest of the drive manufacturers to create less reliable products. The supposed "savings" of doing so would be easily outweighed by the decrease in reputation and sales figures, and the increase in costs to them for replacing drives that went bad during the warranty period (whatever the length).

          The real

        • Re:Just as I suspected (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Rolo Tomasi ( 538414 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @06:33PM (#6072116) Homepage Journal
          I think the users are a big part of the problem. If you don't cool your drive properly, it will die. Heat kills bearings. And the failure rate inreaseses exponentially with temperature. A drive that might run 10 years at 30C might die after 1 year at 60C. What percentage of people actually have active, fresh air cooling for their drives? My guess is that modern drives are more sensitive to heat, and the manufacturers can't really control the cooling design of every individual PC, so they just shortened the warranty.

          You might want to use a utility like DTemp [peterlink.ru] or hddtemp [coredump.free.fr] to check your drive's temperature, and improve your cooling if your temps are over 35C. I've been using a Chieftec Dragon [chieftec.com] case for my home box for a few years now, which has a really nice drive cage with an integrated 80mm fan that blows fresh air directly over the drives, and my temps are rarely over 30C.

          • Re:Just as I suspected (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Trogre ( 513942 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @07:06PM (#6072341) Homepage
            A good case for sticking with 5400rpm models.

          • Re:Just as I suspected (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Fweeky ( 41046 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @08:28PM (#6072851) Homepage
            My guess is that modern drives are more sensitive to heat

            Well, put it this way; that 10MB drive that's been running for a decade is probably spinning quite slowly, running cooler, and has way more leeway over how far the read/write heads can be off before it starts having trouble operating correctly; probably by quite a few orders of magnitude compared to a drive where a single platter may be 8,000 times denser.

            So: 1. The platter can wobble to the point at which the drive rattles like crazy and it'll still be fine. 2. The bearings can fail to this point without anything batting an eyelid. 3. The components can expand a lot more freely without worrying too much about anything becoming misaligned. 4. All these components have less stress on them due to lower RPMs and less aggressive seek times.

            Compare this with your shiny new 80G drive, where if your drive's rattling, it's probably already dead, and if the bearings are going, you're probably going to see tonnes of failing sectors long before you even hear the buzz of the platter's misalignment.

            Quality isn't going down; requirements are getting stricter -- You can compare it to a shooting range; you start off 1m from your target, and slowly increase the range until it's 8km away.

            The quality of your gun and your aim's almost certainly improved massively during that period, but it's pretty obvious which target's easier to hit reliably, especially when you're competing in a cutthroat market where you have to do it before the other guy and at least as cheaply, or else.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Limited effects.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by oiuyt ( 128308 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:07PM (#6071402)
    Only affects drives from a single source in Mainland China that were sent to Taiwan. May affect drives that were marketed elsewhere, but worries about YOUR drive being about to go up in smoke are, for the most part, unfounded.
    • but worries about YOUR drive being about to go up in smoke are, for the most part, unfounded.

      Worries about recently purchased drives are completely founded unless and until we have a list of the affected serial numbers.

    • Only affects drives from a single source in Mainland China that were sent to Taiwan. May affect drives that were marketed elsewhere, but worries about YOUR drive being about to go up in smoke are, for the most part, unfounded.

      Maybe. Many small local pc-clone shops and swap meet types seem to get parts straight from Asia. Lots of gray market stuff going on. Last I heard about half of PCs in the US come from small local pc-clone shops.

      Your current drive may be OK but you should really think twice about the

  • Topical? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by moehoward ( 668736 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:07PM (#6071413)
    Hmmmmm. 12,000 - 15,000 drives sold in Taiwan. They have a 10% failure rate.

    I sincerely question the Slashdot-newsworthiness of this.

    I guess I am surprised that 3 major manufacturers use the same source. Seems weird, but I guess not too uncommon in manufacturing. But seems like a critical component to outsource to China.

    There was more SCO news that just came out in the last hour and it regards Linus. How did this story make it and that not? We don't have nearly enough SCO-lawsuit news these days.

  • Price collusion anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bergeron76 ( 176351 ) * on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:08PM (#6071423) Homepage
    Does anyone else think this seems to be a little fishy?

    I sure hope that one of the part distributors' factories doesn't suddenly explode out on some tiny unheard of little island in Asia or anything.
    [ referring to the great memory price spike back in the mid-late 90's ]

    Just imagine what the price of hard disks would skyrocket up to. It kind of makes you wonder where the storage/profit ratio begins to slope off for the manufacturer...

    • I sure hope that one of the part distributors' factories doesn't suddenly explode out on some tiny unheard of little island in Asia or anything.
      [ referring to the great memory price spike back in the mid-late 90's ]

      I am pretty sure that the Sumitomo Chemical company fire was a complete lie. It's been a while (almost 10 years now?), but I seem to recal claims that this company produced half of the industry's integrated circuit epoxy, and that was the excuse for the dramatic increase in memory prices. Thi

  • now what (Score:4, Interesting)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:08PM (#6071425)
    OK, I read the article and have a new Maxtor that seems to fit the parameters. It works OK now, but this is of concern, particularly since they recently dropped the warranty period from 3 years to 1 year. What option do I have? Is there really a recall in progress, or is it just that there should be?

  • So who's left? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wulfhound ( 614369 )
    Having just lost a bunch of time (although fortunately little valuable data) when one of my IBM DeathStars died, I went out and bought Maxtors 'cause they seemed to be the choice for reliability. So what make are we all supposed to buy now? Cheap hard drives all of a sudden aren't so cheap when you have to buy two of them and a RAID controller to get an acceptable level of reliability...

    • grrr (Score:5, Insightful)

      by deadsaijinx* ( 637410 ) <animemeken@hotmail.com> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:32PM (#6071651) Homepage
      try buying either Western Digital. Or keep buying Maxtor, or even IBM. Seriously, if you people would RTFA, then you would notice that the problems only affect about 10% of the drives that shipped from a plant in china to taiwan. The IBM thing, that was just one set of drives, their new ones kick ass. Maxtor, not my favorite, but this isn't a sign of bad drives from them. Mishaps happen, always have, always will. Now stop freaking and RTFA

  • /.'ed already (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ryan Stortz ( 598060 ) <ryan0rz@gLISPmail.com minus language> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:09PM (#6071432)
    Already /.'ed, but I found some other versions of this story.

    Hard drive makers' stories start unravelling [theinquirer.net]
    Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi say there's no hard drive recalls [theinquirer.net]
    Seagate denies Taiwan hard drive recall claims [theregister.co.uk]

  • Maxtor drives (Score:5, Funny)

    by Psykechan ( 255694 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:09PM (#6071434)
    I've got a 40GB Maxtor in this system but I haven't had any probl

  • From China? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:10PM (#6071440)
    Obviously, those drives are suffering from SARS.

  • Thats funny... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Your_Mom ( 94238 ) <slashdot@@@innismir...net> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:11PM (#6071452) Homepage
    I can't find any mention of it on any of the manufacturers, and Seagate has said That there is no recall [theinquirer.net] Maybe my porn stash is safe after all.

  • Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi say No Recall (Score:5, Informative)

    by whm ( 67844 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:11PM (#6071453)
    Heh - This article on the inquirer specifically debunks the referenced Digitimes article:

    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9704 [theinquirer.net]

    Enjoy....

    ~whm

    • And Then Again, Maybe Not. (Score:5, Informative)

      by HopeOS ( 74340 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:44PM (#6071750)
      Seems they may have reversed that stance:

      http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9740 [theinquirer.net]

      An excerpt:
      Hard drive makers' stories start unravelling


      Warp and woof and wefting
      By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 29 May 2003, 09:55
      MAXTOR AND HITACHI don't have factories in China, right?

      Well only half right. Yesterday, a Hitachi representative in Europe called us to say reports of problems with high capacity drives couldn't possibly be true "because Hitachi doesn't manufacture drives in China".

      One reader pointed out to us that as he was penning his email he was looking at a high end Hitachi drive which bore the clear message "made in China".
      Should be interesting to see how this really pans out.

      -Hope

  • Hard copies of everything (Score:5, Funny)

    by L. VeGas ( 580015 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:12PM (#6071462) Homepage Journal
    That's why I print out copies of everything once my drive is over half full. For video, I print each frame individually. For music, I print out the lyrics and sheet music for each song. I haven't quite figured out what to do about games though. Every time I play one, I have a whole different batch of screenshots to print.

    Oh well, I'm sure the inkjet manufacturers will figure something out.

  • Maxtor... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by neostorm ( 462848 )
    Just the 40 & 80 GB drives? I just grabbed one of those funky 100+20GB drives from Maxtor a month or so ago, and it took a huge crap on me two weeks into using it. Now their tech-support won't reply to my Emails and I can't seem to reach them by phone in a reasonable amount of time.

    Avoid everything Maxtor, not just 40/80 GB ones. Maybe their other drives are better and you've had good experiences, but their tech support is insulting and therefore doesn't deserve the business.

  • buy Western Digital Special Edition (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:20PM (#6071535)
    Buy Western Digital Special Edition, that way you get 3 year warranty. Simple really. I refuse to buy any of the hard drives that only give you 1 year warranty, it's rediculous. (you too should boycott them!)

  • This is not true. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LloydSeve ( 672423 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:25PM (#6071589)
    Seagate has officially issued a press release
    saying this they have not issued ANY recall
    regarding drives shipped to Taiwan.

    Although Maxtor and Hitachi were not available
    for comment, Seagate has "damned" this report
    innacurate.
    Here is the link to the report of Seagate
    denying ANY HDD Recalls.
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/30897.html

  • In other news.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by CptChipJew ( 301983 ) <michaelmiller@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:26PM (#6071599) Journal
    it turns out these problems with the drives were occuring because the S.M.A.R.T. technology turned out to be S.T.U.P.I.D.
  • I don't know about anybody else, but I've got 3 failed (i.e. DEAD) Maxtor ATA-133 drives (40gb, 60gb, & 80gb) sitting in my desk waiting to become paperweights. All of them were made in Singapore and they all failed in the past year (2 in the past 5 months).

    I finally gave up on Maxtor and went with a 120gb ATA-100 Seagate drive which has worked flawlessly for 3 months.

    Crossing my fingers...

  • Harddiskenal Fortitude (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EverDense ( 575518 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:39PM (#6071708) Homepage
    From personal experience...

    Western Digital STILL offer a 3 year warranty on their drives. I've bought two WD 120Gb (8Mb
    cache) disks in the last 4 days. I specifically bought WD because they are the ONLY one of the
    major harddisk manufacturer that are standing behind their product.

    Personally, I wouldn't touch a harddisk that the manufacturer is only prepared to offer a 1 year
    warranty on.
  • I lost one 80GB Maxtor IDE disk three weeks ago, it was JUST 3 monts old.

    Hopefully the disk was not full with important information (it was a backup disk). Most of the info I recovered, but anyway a 3 months old disk just FAILS, no warning, no nothing - just one morning it makes a nice sound GRRRRR and the BIOS says HDD failure

    My next disk is going to be SCSI

  • Just mirror it .. seriously you guys. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by naelurec ( 552384 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:45PM (#6071762) Homepage
    Hard drives are cheap .. hard drives are big .. lots of motherboards come with hardware mirroring .. there is software mirroring .. use it. Pretty much every system I build that has any type of important data on it, I'll throw in two drives (RAID 1). I don't treat this as my ultimate backup (critical data still gets stored offsite on some other medium) but I have seen so many drives fail (IDE & SCSI) that the extra upfront cost to assure against a hard drive failure is minimal compared to the rebuilding of a system from scratch (loading software, recreating documents, downloading stuff.. yada yada yada) Lets face it, with todays drive prices at around $1/GB (cheaper with rebates) it just makes sense.
    • lots of motherboards come with hardware mirroring

      They do? Maybe higher end SCSI ones, but I don't think I've ever seen an IDE motherboard with hardware RAID.

    • Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by scrotch ( 605605 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @06:06PM (#6071896)
      I think the issue here is that people want the products they purchase to last. It's not necessarily a matter of losing data, because that can happen a number of ways and we all know to make backups. It's a matter of hard drives becoming less and less reliable. Which leads to computers in general getting less and less reliable.

      Most of us here, you too I bet, would like to think that computers would get better and better. Meaning more capable and more reliable as well as faster and cheaper. This community invests a lot of time learning about, using, and abusing computers. We would like to feel confident that manufacturers will produce reliable equipment that will repay that investment.

      I would like to think that my hard drive will last longer than it takes me to get my computer customized to my desired state. I would like to think that computers won't become so commoditized that when some part malfunctions they are just thrown away like televisions, vcrs, radios, etc. I would like to think that my purchase will last until it is obsolete - it's not like that takes that long these days.
    • Wait... so you're saying we should reward the manufacturers of crap harddisks by buying twice as many?

      Would you buy a reliable harddisk that was twice as expensive? -if it was guaranteed for five years-
    • Shoot, if you're going to pay twice as much for the storage, you might as well go with SCSI.

  • RIAA Cheers Defective Drives, SCO to Follow (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @05:52PM (#6071808)
    Today the RIAA cheered the discovery of defective hard drives. "Defective hard drives will not be used to store pirated songs and movies from illegal P2P networks," their spokesman said, adding, "We're calling on our paid-for friends in Congress to mandate defective hard drives for all users."

    While SCO has yet to be heard from, rumors are that they will drop all suits against users who certify that they only use defective drives in their Linux systems.

  • For the *few* on this site who use Windows, take advantage of Windows RAID [labmice.net]. Install Windows 2000 server, mirror the drive [microsoft.com], then put a modified boot.ini file on the hard drive. When the one drive takes a shit, you just pop in that disk w/the boot.ini [microsoft.com] file to boot to your known good hdd.
  • I just had my Maxtor 60Gb drive die on me over a weekend, halfways through it's 3 year warrantee. The one drive still chugging along and surviving that crash is my 40Gb model.

  • Western Digital (Score:4, Interesting)

    by yamcha666 ( 519244 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @08:48PM (#6072962)
    Hmmm, maybe I made a good choice by trusting my data to Western Digital drives and only WD drives. To this day I have never bought a Maxtor (or Seagate) even though it was cheaper than Western Digital. So far, I've purchased 300GB worth of hard drive space from WD ... Good choice I have made, it seems.

  • General failure? (Score:3, Funny)

    by cmburns69 ( 169686 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @10:49PM (#6073627) Homepage Journal
    Whos general failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?

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