| The only drives I ever had trouble with were Western Digital Drives. Three
| of them just died after short usage. My very first PC, a 486SX 25Mhz, came
| with an 80 MEGABYTE WD Caviar, which failed after two weeks. Another 540MB
| drive died the same way, and a 20GB drive I bought to put in my sister's PC
| suffered the same fate. They all exhibited the same behavior, they would
| spin up then stop.I'd have to violently shake the drives as they were
| spinning up to get them to "catch" (for lack of a better word) The drives
| would work until the PC was shut off. At least I was able to get the data
| off the drives.
This is a problem known as sticktion, in which a drive binds at start,
but once running is fine. I ran several drives like that for some years
without incident (system was up for about 700 days), and other than
having to rock the tower from side to dis to get a spin-up, they worked
flawlessly.
Needless to say I did not have the spin down on idle feature enabled.
Other than some issues with the early 420/540MB drives, I haven't had
issues with WD, and prompt replacement kept me from being overly upset.
I am quite good (ie. paranoid) about backups, so I was never bitten
beyond inconvenience.
--
Bill Davidsen <
[email protected]> CTO, TMR Associates
As we enjoy great advantages from inventions of others, we should be
glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and
this we should do freely and generously.
-Benjamin Franklin (who would have liked open source)