Re: good drive / bad drive (maxtor topic)

[Brad Campbell <brad@wasp.net.au>]

Guy wrote:
> It would be handy if someone would do an extended test of all of the disk
> drives.  Consumer Reports does this type of thing all the time, just not on
> disk drives.  I don't think they do any extended tests on any computer
> hardware.  The testing should continue for 5 years.  And it could be mostly
> automated.  No user interaction unless something goes wrong.  Now we need
> someone with money!  :)
> 

Problem with this is by the time the test has any sort of meaningful data, the drives have been 
obsoleted/EOL'd.

For the record I have 12 Maxtor Maxline-II 250GB drives here which have 200 days on the clock and 
nary a hiccup. I don't doubt people have trouble with Maxtor drives, hell prior to the release of 
the Maxline-II drives I would not have looked at them sideways, too many previous bad experiences.
Having said that, I have had just as many Seagate drives fail and I won't touch them either. I had a 
bad run with WD and the dodgy firmware that failed when used in a RAID, and I have had a couple of 
them fail recently.

The only drives I have had long enough to consider a good sample were Quantum Fireballs, and I ran 
those for 5 years with no failures. A friend of mine, however was not so lucky and had a huge 
failure rate with them.

Besides the IBM deathstar fiasco I really believe there appears to be little rhyme or reason to 
patterns of failure. Bad batches, lousy operating conditions, different usage patterns, bad 
wholesaler/transport handling will all play a part.

I'm just crossing my fingers and making sure the drives are well cooled, have minimised temperature 
cycling (not shutting the box down unless I have to) and are well monitored.

I'm about to purchase another 25 Maxline-II's so that might help with the sample distribution.
(At least Maxtor have a decent RMA process, WD's internation RMA process sucks)

-- 
Brad
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