[G5] Drives????

[Zane H. Healy]

At 10:07 PM -0500 7/26/05, Pat wrote:
>My good friend, with a Dell less than 6 months old, and my d-i-l had 
>HD's die the same day...both Dells.  The good friend had a Maxtor 
>SATA drive in hers.  I've owned 6, no 7 Macs and they all still 
>work...no drive failures.
>
>Is this a PC problem, or am I just very lucky?  I'm knocking on wood 
>as I write this on my iMac G5.
>
>I don't know about Maxtor HDs and have no idea about what my d-i-l 
>had in hers.
>
>Is this common on Macs, or if not, which drives have a bad record? 
>How can I tell what my 3 Macs have now?

Drives from any manufacturer at some time or another have bad failure 
rates.  Among the most infamous are the IBM Deskstars (aka 
Deathstars).  Western Digital had basically the exact same problem a 
couple years ago with their drives.

Cooling also plays a *huge* factor in drive lifespans, most of mine 
that have died, I attribute to poor cooling.  The one that I lost in 
my old G4/450AGP was due to my "cooking" the controller board with 
another drive.

Then again sometimes you just have bad luck.  I attribute the death 
of my 2 month old 300GB Seagate drive that I bought as a new system 
disk for my G5 2x2, as bad luck.  In fact I now suspect that it was 
bad when I bought it, which brings up another interesting point, I'd 
now recommend against doing quick formats, as they don't properly 
test the drive, sure it takes a lot longer to write a "1" out to each 
bit, but the drive will be safer to use.

At work we deal with *LARGE* file servers, and when our computer room 
looses power, or we have to power them down, we know a few won't 
power up.  They're to used to be running, and hot, so when they cool 
down some die.

Something I do to try to increase the lifespan of my drives is I 
don't let the computers spin them down to save power.

		Zane


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| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
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