It would be handy if someone would do an extended test of all of the disk drives. Consumer Reports does this type of thing all the time, just not on disk drives. I don't think they do any extended tests on any computer hardware. The testing should continue for 5 years. And it could be mostly automated. No user interaction unless something goes wrong. Now we need someone with money! :)
Problem with this is by the time the test has any sort of meaningful data, the drives have been obsoleted/EOL'd.
For the record I have 12 Maxtor Maxline-II 250GB drives here which have 200 days on the clock and nary a hiccup. I don't doubt people have trouble with Maxtor drives, hell prior to the release of the Maxline-II drives I would not have looked at them sideways, too many previous bad experiences.
Having said that, I have had just as many Seagate drives fail and I won't touch them either. I had a bad run with WD and the dodgy firmware that failed when used in a RAID, and I have had a couple of them fail recently.
The only drives I have had long enough to consider a good sample were Quantum Fireballs, and I ran those for 5 years with no failures. A friend of mine, however was not so lucky and had a huge failure rate with them.
Besides the IBM deathstar fiasco I really believe there appears to be little rhyme or reason to patterns of failure. Bad batches, lousy operating conditions, different usage patterns, bad wholesaler/transport handling will all play a part.
I'm just crossing my fingers and making sure the drives are well cooled, have minimised temperature cycling (not shutting the box down unless I have to) and are well monitored.
I'm about to purchase another 25 Maxline-II's so that might help with the sample distribution. (At least Maxtor have a decent RMA process, WD's internation RMA process sucks)
--
Brad
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