[ale] OT: HW failure

[Frank Z.]

> On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Geoffrey wrote:
> 
> > 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...)
> 
> Ok, I'm not sure whether I'm jealous of you, or I should be looking 
to 
> exchange a slightly used karma for a new one.
> 
> I had four drives die within a year (one after another), in one 
machine. I 
> didn't worry about guarentees as I was dependent on that machine. 
Life got 
> much better (and less expensive!) when I changed the controller along 
with 
> the drive.
> 
> I'm not an engineer, but I suspect that squirrelly hardware on the 
other 
> end of the ribbon cable can encourage a hard drive to self-destruct. 
I 
> have to wonder if such a mechanism doesn't explain some of the horror 
> stories concerning multiple serial drive failures? 
>  
> 

Interesting observation. The Maxtors I had that failed (the 540 MB 
ones) back then as I recall were all being used on an AcerOpen P100. 
I'm pretty sure the power supply was okay, as I used that board to run 
a pair of smaller Conners with no problems, but that mb did have an 
issue with the ide buffer chipset on the board. The Cmd 640 bug, or 
something like that, but that was supposed to be some kind of potential 
data corruption issue. (And I think I even had to load a driver 
specific for it under OS/2? Hmm, been a while.) I'm not an engineer 
either, but perhaps it affected the circuitry somehow on the Maxotrs?
-fgz