[G5] Drives????

[Pat]

I'm sorry, but I need plain English on this helpful note...like what is 
"Cooling" and what is 'hot'?  I'm lost...do you mean you don't put them 
to sleep?

Pat
On Jul 26, 2005, at 11:43 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:

> 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
>
>