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Any Recourse for Failed Drives?
mijoe asks: "I have been using various HDDs in my boxes with the exception of Western Digitals since I had some problems with them in the past. My recent issue was with a pair of Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 120s. I had both drives fail in about a 2 month span. One of them is 14 months old, and is out of warranty. The logic board is bad (I swapped with a good one and recovered my data), but Maxtor was very short with me when I asked where I could buy replacement boards. Since then, I've switched to Seagate drives for the 5 yr warranty and quiet performance. Is there any place I can buy parts? It seems like a huge waste to throw out a 120 gig drive with the mechanical bits in good working order. What can I do when drives break down? Should I just switch to another manufacturer until I suffer a rash of failures again and then move to the next company?"
Drives often die because they get too hot , or too cold, don't turn PCs off overnight in winter if they are in a non heated enviroment.
and install fans pointing at your drives !
Anyone remember those fujitsu drives (20-40s) ?
those failed because a chip didn't like it hot or cold
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.
Historically there have only been enough top-notch HDD design engineers to make about one and a half design teams. The rest are decent enough engineers but they're not "gurus". So every hard-drive manufacturer tries to steal and keep the good guys with one degree of success or another.
The sudden increases and decreases in drive quality seen in every manufacturer over the last couple of decades is a direct result of these guys getting poached.
And then there's the whole assembly line QC problem which I won't go into here.
The short version of this is that Seagate has the best assembly lines right now (good article on it in Business 2.0 recently) and the best team.
The other good guys are scattered around the other mfg which is why other drives are mediocre at best. (I don't think Maxtor has anybody good right now at all which is why they are crap at the moment.)
But Seagate has a good retention plan for their guys going forward so I'd stick with Seagate for at least the next few years after which other mfg will either be out of business or have caught up to what Seagate's doing right now whereupon who knows...?