On 1/14/2010 10:04 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

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Already done. Still feel a bit burned by the whole matter though.

I still feel burned from IBM's 75GXP fiasco ~7 years ago, even joined the lawsuit at the time(and got booted by the judge because I was in another state), had probably an 80% failure rate on those disks. I got a PDF on a CD somewhere that has all kinds of internal IBM docs(from the lawsuit) showing how they knew what the problems were but refused to fix them.

OT but reminded me of that..

Seagate Barracudas - mid-nineties, and again three-four years ago. Mid-nineties, first time as a sysadmin, and in nine months, *five* out of... was it eight? failed, one *twice*. The Sun account rep for who I worked for knew me by name.... I won't *ever* touch a Barracuda willingly.

That's not a particularly useful reaction because every vendor has shipped bad batches and it's a toss of the dice who will be next. Better to avoid short warranties and bad customer service - and never use the same model/batch for your backups as the live systems.

On 1/14/2010 10:41 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

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On 1/14/2010 10:04 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

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Already done. Still feel a bit burned by the whole matter though.

I still feel burned from IBM's 75GXP fiasco ~7 years ago, even

<snip> >>> OT but reminded me of that.. >> >> Seagate Barracudas - mid-nineties, and again three-four years ago. >> Mid-nineties, first time as a sysadmin, and in nine months, *five* out >> of... was it eight? failed, one *twice*. The Sun account rep for who I >> worked for knew me by name.... I won't *ever* touch a Barracuda >> willingly. > > That's not a particularly useful reaction because every vendor has > shipped bad batches and it's a toss of the dice who will be next. > Better to avoid short warranties and bad customer service - and never > use the same model/batch for your backups as the live systems.

Ah, no. Back in the eighties and early nineties, I thought highly of Seagates. Then, in the mid-nineties, *every* *single* ISP in Chicago had dumped the then-new Seagate Barracudas... and not a year after that, I got stuck with them in the external drives for my Sun, and the problem - note that I said one of them was replaced *twice* - clearly lasted for at least a couple of years. Then, about 4 years ago (plus or minus a year), I was hearing the same thing. It appears to me that Seagate, esp. with the Barracuda line, has a tendency to rush them out the door with clearly inadequate quality control. They've done it twice, ten years apart, so I take that as an institutional failing.

But they weren't the only ones - just perhaps the biggest volume vendor, generally for good reasons. Name someone that hasn't shipped a bad drive - that we can afford.

Besides, single drive failures should really be the least of your problems because they are common enough that ordinary OS's and controllers have simple techniques to deal with them. But there are a near-infinite number of other things that can go wrong that you also need to be prepared for.