On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 13:50 -0500, Tim wrote:
> Herbert Graf wrote:
> 
> > Generally, when I start to run out of space on a drive in a major way I
> > buy a new larger drive, install a fresh OS, copy my data over, and then
> > store the old drive. In the long run it's probably one of the safest and
> > cheapest ways of preventing data loss.
> 
> I do not have any personal experience but I've read that regular 
> consumer quality hard drives (vs. enterprise class 24x7 rated drives) 
> can be fairly unreliable if they are not turned on and run frequently. 
>   The reports are that the bearings and other mechanical components 
> are more prone to sticking, etc. in the lesser quality drives. Has 
> anyone experienced a problem with this after you've pulled a drive off 
> the shelf after 6 months or a year?

This used to be a big problem, but as is so common in the media, they
tend to get a story and stick to it, even if the story has changed LONG
ago.

I have a ~10 year old drive (340MB, man it was big in it's time) that I
powered up a few weeks ago, worked fine. Two 100MB laptop drives still
work fine (I use them from time to time in my "interface a PIC to IDE"
projects as a compatibility test).

My 2.1GB drive worked fine as of 8 months ago, and my 13GB drive worked
fine as of last week.

One of my 40GB drives is actually living in another running machine at
the moment.

In fact, in all my time, I've had TWO drives fail on me. The first was a
40MB stepper motor based MFM drive from the XT days, that one siezed up
a few years ago when I tried powering it up. The second drive that
failed was one of the IBM drives that was prone to failure about 5 years
ago. It failed in less then one year. I RMA'd it and sold the
replacement.

vs. other media hard drives, for me, have be VERY reliable. I've had CDs
go after a year. I don't know about DVD-Rs yet, but I do know one of my
DVD-RW disks doesn't read right anymore.

Aside from the disks, I've had HORRIBLE luck with optical DRIVES. My
first CD burner (a 2X writer, man it flew...) died after two years. A
Pioneer 10X CDROM died after 2 years. An LG DVD writer died after 1
year. I've actually started simply replacing the optical drive in my
system every year to avoid problems.

TTYL

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