[geeks] HP announces EOL for AlphaServer systems

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 @ 00:14 -0500, Nick B. said:

[broken formatting fixed, all your text was one huge line]

> It's not so much that I avoid Seagate due to their quality, it's that
> I avoid seagate due to their tech support's willingness to replace a
> drive under warrenty.  I've had many drives.  I've RMA'd drives at
> least several times, with each current maker.  Seagate sucks.
> Maxtor/Quantum are ok, but nothing to write home about.  IBM is iffy,
> sometimes they're great, sometimes they're not.  WD?  I've never had a
> problem with, and I've only had 1 or 2 drives fail outside warrenty
> (IDE only here, I've only got one of their scsi drives, and it's still
> going strong).

I have RMAd drives with Seagate, and never had any trouble. What did
they do to you? It seems like this varies with people quite a bit for
some reason.  

In terms of reliability, I'm very leery of Maxtor.  It's usually among
the worst rated drives in reliability tests, and 2-3 years ago a CompUSA
store manager told me that defective Maxtor drive returns outnumbered
all other returns combined.

Western Digital also seems to have problems, but more like they have
inconsistent QC. You can get several of the same model, and some will
run for years, while others of the same model die very quickly.

Out of 6 WD drives I've had, only my current 20GB Caviear with over 30K
power on hours has lasted more than 2 years. Maybe they are better now.

It's unfortunate that there seem to be no lasting and serious efforts to
test hard drives and keep the results public. It would be a nice thing
to have, perhaps funded by various company but run as an open project.




-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [javalin: an unwieldy programming weapon used
to stab a software project through the heart until dead]