Are Newer And Faster IDE Drives Troublesome?

viperjsw writes: "Earthweb is running an interesting article on how there seems to be a failing trend in newer 7,200 RPM IDE hard drives. I am the lead hardware engineer for my co with four thousand 7,200 RPM ATA100 Maxtor and IBM hard drives. I have not seen any failure trends, though failure rates are at about 5-10%. Are Earthweb's reports verifiable?"

Comments

I want last year's model

[hamjudo]

I want last year's model, but not just any year old model. I want a model that has had a low failure rate.

Where would I find reliability ratings for disks?

Actually, for me, two year old models should be fine. 40 Gbytes is way more than I need for most of my systems. But, I want a new drive, not one that's been sitting on a shelf for 18 months. An old drive probably has some new failure modes, hardening of the lubricants or something.

HDD failure due to mounting angle

[E-prospero]

On a somewhat related note, does anybody have any experience with drive problems resulting from the physical mounting of drives at unusual angles (i.e., at a 45 degree roll or pitch, rather than horizontal or vertical)? Should one expect higher failure rates, or lower drive lifespans, as a result of unusual mounting arrangements?

Manufacturer specifications always state that drives must be mounted horizontal or vertical, but who ever pays any attention to the manufacturer.... :-)

Similarly for CD and DVD drives - are there any potential problems with mounting these drives at an angle? I have played around with mounting drives at angle; the drive trays etc seem to work fine when the drive is on an angle, but it is difficult to test long term performance or failure likelyhood when you only have one drive to play with.

The reason I'm interested: I'm working on a case mod, but it looks like I will have to mount the drives at wierd angles to accomodate the case geometry...

Thanks,
Russ Magee %-)