<< And my take on bad sectors is, if a disk ever gets bad sectors I am gonna replace it ASAP. My experience with bad sectors is that they have a nasty habit of multiplying and I would never trust a disk which has developed a fault. >>
The problem is, bad sectors of most kinds will not simply show themselves, and a normal software utility will not help. I had a WD RAID w/ IBM boot drive system running at my friend's LAN party when my other friend knocked my PC over while moving a table. First thing I did, was run Scandisk on the RAIDed drives (Where all my stuff was), and sure enough the computer would do a hard-lock and restart (If you left it locked for ~5 mins). If you run DOS Scandisk, same thing. Norton Utilities? Same. SpinRite? Guess. No matter what, with regular software utilities, you've got the same problem. It took days to copy the thousands of MP3s off it because about 1 in 10 (of 6,967 total) would lock up the computer for 5 mins and you had to be there to start copying the next in the list. I've run into Seagate and especially Toshiba drives with the EXACT same symptoms. In fact, EVERY Seagate and Toshiba drive that I've personally casually encountered (Involving repartitioning or formatting) that's 2 or more years old has had this unfixable problem (That totals to around 8 drives). To most people, that translates into having no idea why FDISK keeps "Recovering Allocation Units" or Format can't format a partition unless it's size is under the percentage it keeps locking up at (My friend's Toshiba laptop had to be in 4 partitions, and Windows is installed on a 500MB one!). So you see, with no real diag utility, you don't really know if you can trust a drive of not! Another issue I ran into: You can't fix the drives when they're on a RAID card, and when you connect to a regular IDE channel FDISK won't let you delete the corrupted partition without being an ASCII genius (The partition label is corrupted from striped RAID data). But the diag utilities always have a "write zeros to disk" option that really helps!
So I offer this advice to everyone: NEVER EVER EVER BUY ANYTHING BUT IBM OR WESTERN DIGITAL
I don't care how unreliable IBM is, because you know if it's bad unlike the others and you can just buy an older and more reliable model (They have an excelent history, if not the best)
I don't care how loud, or hot Western Digital's are. Just get a slower one, pad your case, or add extra cooling.
If we don't start buying what's really important, the Toshiba and the others will never shape up. What do you think they do when you RMA them? They run the same diagnostic/repair utility that they won't let you have.
Oh yeah, on don't ever ever EVER buy Samsung: Maximum PC makes a good point in a recent issue
Plus, WinNT, 2K, XP's built-in Dynamic Disk RAID isn't slower than High-Point and Promise's RAID controllers, because they aren't true hardware cards anyway. So for safety reasons, use XP's.
