Re: Good news / bad news - The joys of RAID

[David Greaves <david@dgreaves.com>]

Mark Hahn wrote:

>>Never buy Maxtor drives again!
>>    
>>
>
>you imply that Maxtor drives are somehow inherently flawed.
>can you explain why you think millions of people/companies
>are naive idiots for continuing to buy Maxtor disks?
>
>this sort of thing is just not plausible: Maxtor competes 
>with the other top-tier disk vendors with similar products 
>and prices and reliability.  yes, if you buy a 1-year disk,
>you can expect it to have been less carefully tested, possibly
>be of lower-end design and reliability, and to have been handle
>more poorly by the supply chain.  thankfully, you don't have 
>to buy 1-year disks any more.
>
>read the specs.  make sure your supply chain knows how to 
>handle disks.  make sure your disks are mounted correctly,
>both mechanically and with enough airflow.  use raid and 
>some form of archiving/backups.  don't get hung up on which 
>of the 4-5 top-tier vendors makes your disk.
>
>  
>

Yeah, you're right.
Of course - the fact that 2 of *my* 6 Maxtor 250Gb SATA drives (3 year 
warranty) date stamped at various times in 2004 have failed is 
coincidence and should, of course, be expected with a MTBF of millions 
of hours.

Oh, please note I'm not Robin - that must be a coincidence too :)

Personally I'm waiting for the revelation that they are recycled IBM 
Deskstar 70's ;)

I take your point about supply chain though - anything that's shipped by 
courier is suspect.

David