[ale] OT: HW failure

[Frank Z.]

> Calvin Harrigan wrote:
> 
> > Funny you should mention that, I've had similar experiences with WD.
> > Returned a 1.6 Gig 6 times!
> 
> You guys must have bad Karma or Mojo or something.  I've had one 
drive 
> go bad in all the drives I've ever used. (Maxtor, Western Digital, 
IBM, 
> Seagate...)
> 
> Until later, Geoffrey	esoteric at 3times25.net

Dunno, but I do admit for a while back then that the thought had 
crossed my mind that maybe somehow it *was* me. Until the third time 
with that Maxtor failure, and consequently reading other remarks about 
them elsewhere -- I wasn't using any of those CHS translation style 
utils that faked out limited BIOSs either... erm, I forget now what 
they called it, but these were clearly mechanical failures with that 
sickening clunk-thunk noise. I do give Maxtor credit (at least, back 
then) for a no-hassle return policy. Either they had very good customer 
service (then?), or maybe they knew something I did not? Actually, 
IIRC, the third time they shipped me a 850MB hd, that's how fast those 
things were beginning to increase in capacity. I rarely used it as I 
was doing Win (sorry) desktop support then, and the larger 1GB+ drives 
started showing up and the used drives from my company would drop into 
my lap as they upgraded to 2.1 then 3GB hds, almost exclusively 
Seagates. I saw hundreds of those. Funny, the 2.1GB Seagates were very 
slow and had THE highest failure rates than the 1.0, 1.6, and 3GB 
Seagates combined, that I saw of anyway. I still have a lot of them on 
smaller PCs in the house, churning away after four and more yrs of 
almost constant use.
-fgz