Molle Bestefich wrote:
I'm looking for new harddrives.
This is my experience so far.
SATA cables:
=============
I have zero good experiences with any SATA cables.
They've all been crap so far.
3.5" ATA harddrives buyable where I live:
==========================================
(All drives are 7200rpm, for some reason.)
Unless you live where delivery services don't go, you can get 10k SATA
or 15k Ultra320 drives from many vendors. I checked newegg just as a
reference, there are many others.
The rest of your questions sound like you are running the drives very
hot, and drive life is inversely proportional to temperature. There are
mil-spec drives which will live at 100C, but they are not readily
available and cost way more than keeping drives cool. I have no idea
what kind of SATA cable failure you are seeing, I have some in machines
I take to give presentations, and if 10k miles in the back of an SUV
didn't cause problems, I doubt any normal operation would. I've had them
bad when I got them, but if they work once they keep working, in my
experience.
I've tried Maxtor and IBM (now Hitachi) harddrives.
Both makes have failed on me, but most of the time due to horrible
packaging.
I don't care a split-second whether one kind is marginally faster than
the other, so all the reviews on AnandTech etc. are utterly useless to
me. There's an infinite number of more effective ways to get better
performance than to buy a slightly faster harddrive.
I DO care about quality, namely:
* How often the drives has catastrophic failure,
* How they handle heat (dissipation & acceptance - how hot before it
fails?),
* How big the spare area is,
* How often they have single-sector failures,
* How long the manufacturer warranty lasts,
* How easy the manufacturer is to work with wrt. warranty.
I haven't been able to figure the spare area size, heat properties,
etc. for any drives.
Thus my only criteria so far has been manufacturer warranty: How much
bitching do I get when I tell them my drive doesn't work.
My main experience is with Maxtor.
Maxtor has been none less than superb wrt. warranty!
Download an ISO with a diag tool, burn the CD, boot the CD, type in
the fault code it prints on Maxtor's site, and a day or two later
you've got a new drive in the mail and packaging to ship the old one
back in. If something odd happens, call them up and they're extremely
helpful.
Unfortunately, I lack thorough experience with the other brands.
Questions:
===========
A.) Does anyone have experience with returning Hitachi, Seagate or WD
drives to the manufacturer?
Do they have manufacturer warranty at all?
How much/little trouble did you have with Hitachi, Seagate or WD?
B.) Can anyone *prove* (to a reasonable degree) that drives from
manufacturer H, M, S or WD is of better quality?
Has anyone seen a review that heat/shock/stress test drives?
C.) Does good SATA cables exist?
Eg. cables that lock on to the drives, or backplanes which lock
the entire disk in place?
Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for answers (if any) :-).
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--
bill davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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