[X4U] Applecare and hard drives

[Peter Krug]

On Oct 5, 2005, at 9:13 AM, Linda wrote:

> On 10/5/05 3:32 AM, Philip J Robar wrote:
>
>
>> In the 11 years that I managed 100's of machines that ran 24 hours a
>> day I only had 2 hard drives fail. The vast majority of people will
>> never experience a hard drive failure during their life.
>
> IMO hard disks are the weak link in a computer, and there are only  
> two kinds
> of computer users: Those who have already had a disk crash/data  
> problem not
> of their own making, and those who are about to. Once upon a time I  
> thought
> they were trustworthy and rock-solid, but now the only peace of  
> mind I have
> is extensive data duplication.

My experience regarding hard drives is that quality control in the  
last few years may be going downhill.  We had 20 beige G3's (ca.  
1998) and none of their HDs have failed, these are 6-8 GB drives.  As  
we've upgraded to newer machines, I've put these drives into new G4  
towers (it makes the user feel better to still see all their stuff,  
and gives them an emergency boot disc after I upgrade the system  
software).  I've had 3 HDs out of 20 fail in the last 4 years, but  
all of them were the drives that shipped with the new towers.  The  
older drives keep chugging along.  Is it because corruption is more  
likely as drive density increases?

Peter

A little computer haiku:
I can't remember
the last time I restarted
I love OS X

This message sent with Mail.app 2.0.2 on Mac OS X 10.4.2
pkrug at mac.com