I am glad you are having good luck with Maxtor. I hope they and others improve the life span/quality of the disk drives. Seems like you will have a good sample, so keep us up to date! I know Tvio (and/or replaytv) use Maxtor, but only has a 30 or 90 day warranty! Really risky if you buy the non-transferable (to a new unit) lifetime subscription. You must read the fine print! Guy -----Original Message----- From: Brad Campbell [mailto:brad@xxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2004 1:17 AM To: Guy Cc: 'Mark Klarzynski'; linux-raid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: good drive / bad drive (maxtor topic) Guy wrote: > 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 /"\ Save the Forests \ / ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN Burn a Greenie. X AGAINST HTML MAIL / \ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
