Jimmy Bradley wrote:

  I'm just curious if any one else has noticed this. I've bought

hard drives from both Walmart and Best Buy. If I can wait, I order them from newegg.com. I'm beginning to think that the staff at both Walmart and Best Buy, somewhere along the supply line must dribble the drives like basket balls. The reason I say that is all the drives I have bought from those two places fail within a few months time. Has anyone else noticed that? Just curious

You might want to consider them as possibly recycled drives. If you don't have a copy of SpinRite you can force the drive to check all the sectors with fdisk ...

fdisk -f -y -c -c

or if you are formatting,

mkfs.ext3 -c -c

will also do this check.

This will byte-swap check and should force updates of SMART statistics and bad-sector detection on the drive.

Jed

Jimmy Bradley wrote:

  I'm just curious if any one else has noticed this. I've bought

hard drives from both Walmart and Best Buy. If I can wait, I order them from newegg.com. I'm beginning to think that the staff at both Walmart and Best Buy, somewhere along the supply line must dribble the drives like basket balls. The reason I say that is all the drives I have bought from those two places fail within a few months time. Has anyone else noticed that? Just curious.

How large is your sample? If you use enough drives you'll find bad ones from every vendor and distributor - and they tend to be bad in batches. I'd guess you just hit a bad batch. Get your warranty replacements from the vendor - I've had pretty good luck with those even though they are probably mostly rebuilt units. Most vendors have some sort of diagnostic utility that you can run if you suspect a problem.