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How many HD have died on you over the course of your computing experience?

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1x IBM 75 GXP keeps trying to die but it's still workin🙂
2 Western Digital - small ones
1 IBM notebook drive 8 gig
1 60 GB Seagate (note: don't play with cold cathods when the computer is running😀
rolleye.gif
😱)
 
3 of 4 Maxtors
0 of 4 Seagates
0 of 1 Quantum
0 of 1 Western Digital

Can you guess which company I don't like?
 
None. And I was stressing a 75GXP pretty heavily for 2 years, and powered on 24/7. It was from the Hungarian plant too, and with no active cooling, close to other heat-producing components like the CPU and video card, and near the back of the case with no rear exhaust fan except the one on a 3 year old Antec PSU on a single fan design (no intake fan on the bottom). It got a bit loud before I ended up retiring it, but I never even developed bad sectors.
 
Pesonally I think about 4 or 5 have all gone bad in about 10 or more years. All WD. I think two of them were those 5 or 6 gig ones they had a large bad run of years ago though.

If I include work experience I would say 700+. Mostly Seagates. Many years ago when 540meg was about the max capacity we got about an %80 failure rate on a shipment of about 500 of them. I avoided Seagate like the plague for a few years after that. But for the last few years I have been buying many of their SCSI drives and they are great. They have been my favorite SCSI manufacturer for a long time now. I prefer WD for IDE though.
 
Of my personal drives...
0 of 3 Western Digitals
3 of 3 IBMs :| (2x 75GXP, 1x 60GXP, when I got the RMA back the last time I SOLD IT!)
0 of 5 Maxtors

Now I used to buy used computer parts and resell them. And I would buy used 10-30gb hard drives for $2 apeice from a local vendor with about 50% being totally dead, and many with bad sectors etc, making about 1 in 7 or 8 sellable. Quantum drives have this square chip thats in the upper right hand hand corner (if your looking at it PCB up, and IDE connetors away from you). It is extremely hot under operation and highly prone to burn. I must have had 200 of these burned chips. The scarey part about it is that Maxtor used a very similar design for a long time with the same chip even up to the 740DX series as far as I know. Western Digital drives in my experience seam to hold up the best.
 
1 Maxtor. Came OEM with my Aptiva and was bad from the get go. Took three months of calls to IBM to get it replaced.
 
Nope, I can't seem to find those statisitcs stashed anywhere.. I suppose I didn't think of keeping track... But here's how many:

GOBS!!!!!!!!!!!

lol
 
Brand new 250MB WD Caviar. It was my fault however.

Attempting to put 3.5" to 5.25" adapter brackets on it with the drive standing on its side very near the edge of the table. Took my hands off the drive to retrieve a screw, it tipped over slipped over the edge and fell about 5ft to the floor landing PCB side down. Cracked the PCB in 2 places. Drive never worked again. WD Rep on the phone was nice about it, had the drive replaced only for shipping costs 😀

I've never had a drive actually just up and die on me. All my hardrives have worked perfectly until the day I got rid of them 😀


The oldest hardrive I have is a 20MB Seagate, uses a old interface (ESDI I believe) 5.25" form factor, its loud and gets hot enough to burn flesh. Made before 1989. (The drive was only a year old when I bought it, cannot remember when I bought it though!) Damned thing has been on nearly 24 hrs a day for most of its life and is still going just fine. My grandmother is still using it in her chess/checkers/card games playin 386 😀
 
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