Herbert,

(Late reply, I know - I haven't caught up from the New Year yet...)

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 13:31:44 -0500, Herbert Graf wrote:

> 
> On Sun, 2008-02-24 at 10:05 -0800, Harold Hallikainen wrote:
> > > I had several friends who had nothing but trouble with Maxtor in the
> > > years around 2000. I've never had a Western Digital drive fail, and I've
> > > personally used over 20 over the years. Maybe it's all luck.
> > 
> > I've never had ANY hard drive fail in the 20 years or so I've been using
> > them. I think it's because I do frequent backups.
> 
> I'm not sure how backing up your data affects hard drive longevity...

Ah!  That's because of Howard's Law of Backups:

 "The disk drive failure always occurs *just before* the next backup has completed"

If you do backups often enough, then the drive doesn't have time to realise, and fail, before you do the next one.  :-)
 
Of course if you don't do backups it doesn't invalidate the law, just brings into force Howard's Law of Failures:

 "Any system will fail at the worst possible moment"

so in the case of a disk, that's when you've just spent many hours creating some edifice and saved it to the disk, just ahead of the deadline.

The Law is not to be confused with Howard's Rule of Backups:

 "Never have just one copy of anything that you don't want to lose"

This includes having just a single backup copy, which is reused, because the above Laws say that the drive will fail when you've just started the backup, and have 
thus destroyed the previous one by starting to write over it.  I've seen this happen countless times.  (It's not that they couldn't be counted, just that I didn't! :-)

It shouldn't need saying, but I'm going to anyway:  Make sure your backups are good!  I was involved in the recovery from a disaster some time ago where some 
brain-donor reformatted the drive in a Netware server, without checking that there was a good backup (without even asking if there was!).  There wasn't, and the 
resultant fallout involved hundreds of man-hours of re-keying, a serious detetioration in the client-IT relationship, and a six-figure compensation claim.

> FWIW, in my personal computing I've seen three hard drives fail in my
> years. The first was a 340MB conner (remember them?). One was an IBM
> 13.6GB Deskstar, they were nicknamed "Deathstars" by the industry...
> 
> The last was my brother's IBM laptop drive.
> 
> As a result, I've never purchased another IBM/Hitachi hard drive.

This is definitely a YMMV situation - I've had experience of disk failures of every make, and although the DeathStar range did have a bad patch (when they went 
from 60 to 75GB, for some reason) all the others have had too.
 
> In my professional work we had a large number of Fujitsu drives fail
> (don't remember the size, not huge, I think 10GB?). Around 50% of the
> drives failed after only a few years. Granted they weren't treated the
> best, but the Seagates purchased at the same time and in the same
> room/machines all still work to this day.

My own preference for manufacturer, based purely on personal experience, is:

Seagate
Western Digital
Hitachi (yes, really!) 

and the ones I avoid:

Maxtor
Fujitsu
Samsung

In fact it's probably a lottery, but you have to have some hope that you're doing some good to cling to!  :-)

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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