[TriLUG] Computer stores] - Disk failures

Derek Linz chapelhilllaptopshop at gmail.com
Wed Jul 27 15:35:29 EDT 2011


I almost forgot, here's one of the few large-scale research papers on hard 
drive failure, published by Google, not exactly what you're talking about but 
a good read none-the-less.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B3XF7z2bzplNNGNhZDE2NzQtNDllOC00NDBlLTg1NjgtMzE0YzNkYzUyZDI3&hl=en_US

On Thursday, July 21, 2011 09:45:40 AM Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jul 2011, Brian Henning wrote:
> > But how much more often is a hard drive just a hard drive?
> 
> I used to keep track of which manufacturers had the best
> (least likely to fail) drives and I would scour the
> internet each time I wanted another drive. I never had good
> data on which drives were good.
> 
> I find that Intrex does that for you. They know which drives
> fail and they don't carry them - they don't want returns. I
> asked Tim, the manager at the Durham store about drives one
> day. He said that it's not by manufacturer. One manufacturer
> can be good this year but not the next. Even within
> manufacturers, some drives are good and some aren't. Tim
> showed me the return numbers for the disk he carries (low
> single digit %). Intrex gives you an extended (3 weeks?)
> time to return a drive if it's bad, so you don't have to
> deal with sending it back to the manufacturer if it dies
> tomorrow. The extended time is plenty to run bad blocks.
> I've had one drive fail badblocks and Intrex exchanged it
> without any hassle. All the drives that survived badblocks
> have run beyond their warrantee.
> 
> I happily buy all my drives from Intrex now.
> 
> Joe



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