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

[ozz at ozz.is-a-geek.net]

> 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.

I've had reasonable success with Seagate.  Three failures, one was a 1.2Gb
laptop drive (3 years), a 1.2Gb regular drive (6 months) and a 2Gb SCSI
(but I don't usually count that, as it was a 5.25" full-height monster
from the 80s, and had been in use for over 12 years!).

>> 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.

And yet I have NEVER had a Maxtor fail on me.  Maxtor are the only brand
that have never failed me yet.

> 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.

The 120Gb WD was running only a few degrees above ambient.

>> 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.

I would certainly buy Seagate again.

> 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.

I'll have to check into them some more.

Thanks for the info.

Regards,
Ozz.