Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Are Newer And Faster IDE Drives Troublesome?

Posted by timothy on from the what's-the-real-spin dept.

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?"

1 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. They have special requirements by stienman · · Score: 5, Informative

    7200 RPM drives run hotter than previous drives, and they must be cooled. Previously people rarely gave a thought to drive cooling, and if they don't take it into account now they will see large failure rates. If your drive is too hot to touch after running for an hour, then you need to cool it off.

    I've been installing 7200 rpm IDE drives into servers and workstations for well over a year now, and the only complete failure I've had was one that didn't work from the start. I've had drive errors crop up from heat (put a fan in, seperate it from other equipment (don't sandwich it between the floppy and zip), etc) and from using a 40-wire IDE cable instead of the ata-100 80-wire cables.

    FWIW, I've used Fujitsu until a few months ago, IBM, Maxtor, and few seagates. They have all been at the lower end of the price range ($99 wholesale - went from 10G to 20G and currently using 40G).

    -Adam