Picbits Sales wrote:
> All the Seagate drives I've had over the past 5 years have failed with ba=
d=20
> sectors / seek errors. I've vowed never to touch another Seagate drive=20
> again. My Samsungs have been pretty reliable.

I too avoid Seagate drives like the plague.

A couple of years back, they had a nasty firmware bug which turned ALL=20
of certain firmware versions of their 7200.10 drives into bricks (non=20
responsive) after a certain number of 'on' hours. So in a 24x7 setup it=20
only took a bit over a year for them to simultaneously die (Any 360GB to=20
1 TB was affected if it had firmware version SD12.... SD15).
So DO take a look at the version number of your seagate 7200.10 HDs to=20
save yourself a nasty surprise. (often listed in the BIOS drive info page).

There is a way to recover them (just search on 'seagate brick') but it=20
requires that you make up a custom cable with TTL level convertor and do=20
some trickery with an insulated card on a powered drive and issue=20
cryptic commands via a terminal program.

I have a 64 GB solid state drive (SSD) for my Win7 box, and I LOVE it.=20
Boots up cold in under a minute. Comes out of hibernation to a working=20
desktop in 10 seconds.
I had to buy more RAM since one doesn't want to use a page file on a SSD=20
for wear issues (you have to tweak the config to turn it off), but I=20
have now converted 3 machines to SSDs because it makes such a huge=20
difference on performance.
I found that the specs on the larger drives are better (faster=20
read/write) probably because they can interleave more chips, but they=20
sure do get pricey as size goes up.

Highly recommend SSD for Win7 systems since Win7 knows how to use them=20
'nicely'[trim command for free space m'mnt]. Vista doesn't, so will wear=20
them out quicker. (finite flash cycles even with wear leveling).


Robert

--=20
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