[Pc_Support] 320GB WD3200JD SATA drive for $107 shipped ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

ozz at ozz.is-a-geek.net wrote:
> It's a great price, but I've had nothing but trouble with
> Western Digital drives.

Western Digital drives have largely been manufactured by IBM,
now Hitachi, for the last 5 years.  Brand name means little
-- short of maybe Seagate, who is the only vendor that
manufacturers their own, and to specifications most others do
not.

> Almost every hard drive failure I've had was a WD.
> The last straw for me was when I had a 120GB WD fail
> after less than 3 months.

You should have seen our failure rate of Maxtor disks at
Boeing.  It was horrendous.

But such was typical of most "commodity" disks until just
very recently.  A major issue I've seen is poor cooling as
most "commodity" disks required 40 degree C or less ambient
temperature at 7200rpm.  It's only the new crop of disks that
can tolerate up to 60 degrees C are reliable.

http://www.samag.com/documents/sam0509a/0509a_s1.htm

> I'd rather pay a few extra $$$ and get something more
> reliable.

I've found Seagate to be unbeatable in this regard,
especially since they ship all retail drives with a 5 year
warranty and the new process.

Maxtor and Hitachi (including WD) still test for different
tolerances.

> Now, y'all seem to be having reasonable luck with them,
> so maybe I'm just not lucky with WD.

Failure within 3 months is not an unexpected chance with hard
drives manufactured from 2001-2004.

> All I can say is that my personal experience with WD
> has been very poor.

My experience with all commodity ATA disks, sans Seagate, has
been very poor.  Maxtor drives have regularly crapped out
just after 1 year on my file server at home.  Of course, they
are running 24x7, which is not what they are rated for.

If I had to put drives in file servers today, I'd go with the
new "Nearline" series of drives from Hitachi/WD or Seagate.



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