Updating the 'puter for hardcore ownage

[kandrathe]

If a >3 year old drive fails, it's usually time to upgrade to a bigger and faster drive anyways. I base my drive purchases on personal experience and reviews from reputable sources. And honestly, the most known drive manufacturers like Seagate/WD/Maxtor all produce pretty much equal drives in terms of quality. Everyone always has anecdotal evidence that one is superior to the others, but I bet that the overall failure rates are fairly equal.

Anecdote. I buy Seagate because they are local here in Minneapolis area (a former branch of CDC), and I knew/know many engineers that work there. There have been times when we've had a drive fail in an important server, and after a phone call a Seagate engineer would drive a new one over. It's a luxury to be able to buy the local brew, but they like it when we are brand loyal. I buy PC's every year for work in the thousands, so I've seen lots of failures. It's usually an entire batch that has like a 10% failure rate. The last time we had a bad batch it was Maxtor drives, which does tend to taint your opinion of them for awhile. The thing to remember is that HD are like light bulbs (following a Poisson distribution), some burn out early, some last along time, but most have a defined life that is measured in the industry as MTBF (mean time between failures). Unless you buy enterprise class equipment you won't find the MTBF as the manufacturers don't publish those numbers for consumer grade equipment.

I've been very happy with Seagate, and I think they make a quality product. But, I'm sure some people have been burned too.