[ale] difference among Seagate, WesternDigital & Maxtor ?

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 06:24 -0400, Jim Lynch wrote:
> I've been running WD drives since the early '90's.  Had one fail under 
> waranty.  Only had one Maxtor, it failed about 30 days after I installed 
> it.  Had a few Seagates back in the MFM days, but maybe only one since.  
> This is almost a "religious" choice, if you can permit me to use that 
> word in this context. I have a friend that uses a lot of drives and 
> swears by Samsung drives. 

> I don't think you can go wrong with either WD or Seagate.  Find the 
> cheapest sale, which is usually WD, at one of the Office supply stores 
> or Best Buy (ugh but they have good prices on sale), etc.

	Several years ago we had sooo many WD drives failing at ISS that we
disqualified them as a vendor.  That may no longer be true (been several
years since I've been involved in purchasing or procurement around ISS)
but it was an epidemic with their 2-4 Gig drives all failing the same
way (you got this "click click click" from the HDA recalibrating and
failing to find track 0)...  Something in that Head Disk Assembly was
really bad...  Half life of about 1-2 years in continuous duty.  Just
over the warrenty period (typical).

	I've always had excellent results with Maxtor drives until recently
running into problems with their SATA drives.  Turns out that a certain
combination of Intel chip sets with certain early-run Maxtor (and
others) SATA drives is BAD NEWS.  The drives in question are really a
PATA drive with an SATA converter chip.  The PATA drives (being single
threaded) are capable of generating an error code that is illegal for
SATA drives (being multithreaded).  Basically, it was a "hold" error.
The Intel controller chips were not capable of handling it and it
resulted in some serious failures on Linux.  Found out by reading some
LKML threads AFTER several failures.  Newer "pure" SATA drives don't
have this problem.  I had three 250 Gig Maxtor SATA drives turn into
paperweights in Del servers because of this.  Had to move them to other
hardware that didn't use that Intel controller and then reformat the
drives.


> Jim.


> James Sumners wrote:
> 
> >Personally, I like it in the order you have listed and I don't get
> >Maxtor unless I am broke or have no other choice.
> >
> >On 10/24/05, Courtney Thomas <cc.thomas at earthlink.net> wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>I need a new IDE drive and apparently Seagate, Western Digital and
> >>Maxtor have it to themselves, though I'm receptive if others are more
> >>for less.
> >>
> >>Is there any significant difference among them that I should be aware
> >>of, or just get the biggest I can find for the least cost ?
> >>
> >>Appreciatively,
> >>
> >>Courtney
> >>_______________________________________________
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> >>Ale at ale.org
> >>http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >>
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >
> >--
> >James Sumners
> >http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/
> >
> >"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
> >pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
> >is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
> >drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
> >
> >Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
> >CH:D 59
> >_______________________________________________
> >Ale mailing list
> >Ale at ale.org
> >http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >
> >
> >
> >  
> >
> 
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-- 
 Michael H. Warfield    |  (770) 985-6132   |  mhw at WittsEnd.com  
  /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/       |  (678) 463-0932   |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
  NIC whois:  MHW9      |  An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471    |  possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!
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