I've installed a drive or two in my life, and I've had a lot of experience with different brands and various quirks thereof. Over the years, I've seen some real winners. I recall the "Octagon" brand with a great deal of fondness - it provided a LOT of service calls when I was at the CDC. And usually, when the drive failed and wouldn't spin up, you could get it going again with a properly placed whack with the power on.
Samsung was a bit troublesome, Western Digital wasn't, Maxtor was in the middle. Seagate started out good - but I haven't bought one of them in years. You stay with the major brands, and you'll likely have no problems.
However, there's always an exception. Yesterday I bought a new Western Digital 500 GB drive - (Big Blue's getting a trifle tight on space, I was down to about 100 GB... and if someone had told me a decade back I'd be getting a new drive because I was down to ONLY 100 GB, I'd have said they were nuts... but I've got 2 250s and a 500, and I'm getting a bit cramped...) and attempted to install it.
The thing wouldn't spin up. It wasn't recognized by the computer, tried two different SATA cables and two different power connectors, but it wouldn't even twitch. I figured, what the heck - one dud in twenty years or so - I could deal with that. So I took it back, got another one...
And it's dead also. It SPINS, and the system recognizes it as a drive, but that's as far as it goes. I don't think it's a BIOS problem - it recognizes the other 500 GB w/no problems - but it errors out on the new one.
One? I can stand. Two in a row? That's iffy. Real iffy. Should I try a third? It's hard to decide.
J.
Comments (5)
Make it three: The WestDig drive Lin bought me for Father's Day is a doorstop, and is going back to Best Buy real soon now.
Posted by RNB | July 11, 2008 7:34 AM
Posted on July 11, 2008 07:34
Wow. Their QC must really be slipping...
J.
Posted by JLawson | July 11, 2008 10:58 AM
Posted on July 11, 2008 10:58
The WD is returned - bought a 750GB Seagate. I'll try it here in the shop today, see if it's functional before taking it home.
A 750 GB drive, for $130. The prices just keep dropping. In-f'ing-credible.
J.
Posted by JLawson | July 11, 2008 12:56 PM
Posted on July 11, 2008 12:56
My 'puter at work went down. We could smell that nasty burning electric stuff smell. Called our IT guy (conveniently named "Guy"). Described the problem. He stopped at Fry's and picked up a new hard drive before even coming over. It was a 400G drive. I commented "WHAT? 400gigs? I don't need that much!) He sheepishly said yeah...he knew that...but the 400gig drive was on sale and only $80. The one with less space was more $...
Amazing.
Posted by suek | July 11, 2008 1:03 PM
Posted on July 11, 2008 13:03
Just got a new WD 250 GB 2.5" SATA drive, worked out of the package. Have a nice little external drive case for it.
One of my old WD 40 GB IDE drives went belly-up after 5 years, which is MTBF so no complaints. The other three from that array I am re-purposing to temp. storage drives via external enclosures.
Got a brand new Hitachi travelstar to put in my ancient Desknote... still in the package need to get done in the next couple of days. As Seagate took in Maxtor, I haven't seen any decline in quality there... my only real beef has been with the SATA drive controllers in a couple of notebooks from Dell using ATI interfaces which are now AMD. The drives are fine, but there is something strange between driver and controller causing problems on one system. The drives are Seagate and test good via Seatools and other disk diagnostic software.
That narrows it to: AMD, Dell and Microsoft. My bet is on poor Dell QC, but that is just a hunch after the direction the company has gone the last few years....
Posted by ajacksonian | July 13, 2008 5:49 AM
Posted on July 13, 2008 05:49