[Pc_Support] Western Digital Enterprise 250 GB <pde; wd2500js

[Jason Boxman]

Damien McKenna wrote:
<snip>
> I wouldn't want to specifically draw a correlation between the two, but
> from a business perspective I'd feel safer buying a drive that came with
> a 5 year warranty than a 1 or 3 year.  Couple that with RAID-1 or RAID-5
> and you've got 5 years of data assurance - no guarantee but pretty darn
> good.

I prefer the longer warranty simply because I use drives for a very long
time.  I have a pair of 40GB WDs I'm still running RAID 1 in my workstation
and I have tons of free space and they're plenty fast for the old ECS K7S5A
mainboard.  (Of course, by the time I got them WD had ceased offering three
year warranties.)

I mostly buy Seagates now because the rebate deals always ended up being
sweetest for Seagates at time of purchase.  I've had worse experiences with
Maxtors, though now they're owned by Seagate.  As Bryan said, though, the
brand doesn't really matter.  So I just shop on price, doubledip rebates,
and buy them in pairs.

I see the warranty as guaranteeing I can depend on having a given disk
around for usage for up to five years.  (It's actually by manufacture date,
at least with Seagate, and not sale date, I think.)  If I don't have to buy
a new disk every two years, that's fine by me.  40GB ought to be enough for
anyone.  (I have two 30GB Maxtors RAID1'd with a 3Ware 6200 elsewhere.)