[geeks] Quiet SCSI drives

[nate at portents.com]

> The only "consumer" ATA drives I've had
> problems with are the 'deathstar' IBMs and Maxtors.

My ATA (combined PATA and SATA) drive experiences of the last three years:

Have seen about 200 Western Digital drives in service, and about 20 or so
have failed in that time.  Some late in life, at least half early on, i.e.
within the first 6 months they developed problems, fortunately none so
catastrophic that the data couldn't be copied to another drive.

I made the mistake of using WD PATA drives with a Promise RAID controller,
and they had some nasty firmware which WD never fully fixed, and Promise
couldn't work around, which made the controller think that a drive had
failed when it hadn't.  Dreadful experience.  Switched to Hitachi PATA
drives on the Promise controller (which worked fine), before switching to 
Broadcom RAIDCore controllers with Seagate SATA drives, which have been
totally reliable for over a year though I need to investigate why
performance is nowhere near what it should be.

In the same period of time, have seen about 40 Seagate drives in service
(my personal brand preference), and seen one old 40GB fail, and one 500GB
fail in the first two months.

As for Maxtor, about 20 drives, seen I think one fail, most of them have
been very recent Maxtor drives.

And of course I saw two of the 60GB IBM 'Deathstars' fail - I would have
pulled them immediately had I known they were being used at the time.

- Nate