[TriLUG] My Hard Drive Experience

[rpbarlow at ncsu.edu]

Hi all,

  I'm a new guy to the trilug group - an electrical engineering student at
NC State.  I figured I'd throw in my 2 cents on the hard drive question.

  Just two weeks ago yesterday I had my WD 60 GB drive fail.  The drive
was about 2 years old, so this was unexpected, but fornuately it was
still covered by warranty (I think my replacement drive arrives
today...)  WD seems to be a reputable brand, and there is a statistical
chance of failure, but if the thing had broken just a little later I
would be up the creek without a warranty.

  I think that Seagate's 5 year warranty says a lot.  Doesn't mean they
won't fail, but it means that if you back up your data you will have
working hard ware and (hopefully) no data loss for five years. 
Fortunately for me, my Gentoo system could still read (VERY slowly) the
failed hard drive (NTFS) to get (most) of my data back before I shipped
the thing off to California.  Interestingly, my roommate's Windows
machine could not read anything from the drive whereas Gentoo could
(slowly...)

Randy Barlow