Uncreative Labs

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

we all should know that a hard drive WILL fail, it's on;y a matter of time. not IF but WHEN.
I have 3 Maxtor drives a 1.6 sitting on a shelf, a 20g that I have used heavily and an * gig that I inherited with a old pc.
the 20g I bought new for $30.00 and kept my only copy of some files on it,. Got edgy and did sonme backups.
recently it developed more errors and I copied most files to another drive. many did not copy.
I formatted the drive it took over 12 hours.
and the scandisk screen looked like a shotgun pattern
scandisk found 70+ more bad spots.
I ran a util called maxllf.exe and it ran for 15-20 minmutes
and format and scandisk then found only ONE bad spot.

tried the same thing with the 8g and it helped but still left a lot of errors.

Now how much can I TRUST the 20g drive?
will it fail again and soon?
If I buy a used drive on 'bay how do i know it has not unbdergone the same treatment / repair?

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

these drives are maxtors? I dont know about you but people have been complaning about maxtor harddrive. personaly there alright. i have 5 of them and only 1 is broke. there fairly reliable and are way better than an ibm deathstar, i mean deskstar. Very Happy

most the drive i use are seagate or fujitsu. oh and the 20 gig isn't gona be to safe to put all your data on, if it had bad sectors before, it will happen again, trust me. Backup your backups.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I have enough problems with brand new harddrives failing. I don't think I could ever trust a used one. I really can't wait until the solid state disks become popular so we can put these problems behind us.

I find that reliability of drives has much more to do with the model than the manufacturer. All companies produce their lemons. Until the 75GXP IBM was putting out some high quality stuff. It seems that one drive destroyed their reputation. Quantum made good stuff until the KA/KX Fireball series. I used to think Maxtor made great stuff until they bought Quantum. The Quantum technology they used in their new drives killed their company too. I think now Maxtor is owned by Seagate if I am not mistaken. Seagate stuff seems to be pretty good overall, but recently their Barracuda line has become pretty crappy.

You really have to do your homework before investing in a disk drive. Though even then you are taking your chances. If you're serious about data protection you should be backing up onto optical media regularly. That's your only choice next to going SCSI and RAID.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Sure all drives die eventualy, but like most electronics if they servive the first 30 days they tend to last a long time.

Seagate has a free bootable CD you can download from their website to check HDs for bad sectors, it is very quick and DOS based. When I get a lot of drives in I test them all out, if there are any bad sectors I either use it for testing machines (if the bed sectors are only a couple) or I junk it. I will junk any drive that fails its S.M.A.R.T (or whatever its called), the seagate util will show that information as well.

Lets face it buying a new drive is a crapshoot just like using an older drive, but the older ones seem to last a long time if they liveout the warrenty period, while newer drives seem to be built on the edge of reliability.

You should backup anything important anyway.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

I purchased a gray market maxtor 60gb hard drive for $150 before they were even in stores 7 years ago. It was marketed as a workstation/server drive and I still have it running happily in my system. I think drives in the consumer market have become almost useless in the last 5 years or so. Though I still have a stockload of 2gb and down to 5mb drives that work perfectly.

There are always duds but honestly I trust old hard drives for reliability much more than modern equivalents assuming they are a normal name brand. Most every 40gb cheapo western digital and maxtor drive I bough in the 2ks has died in under 2yrs (some in a matter of months)

Cheers
Ryan

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Oddly enough, I've got a MiniScribe (Maxtor's predecessor) 8425 (20MB) drive still working after almost 20 years. It sees a good deal of use in a Compaq Portable II, and has for several years. No errors, no corruptions, working flawlessly. Guess they really don't make them like they used to...

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

T-R-A wrote:

Oddly enough, I've got a MiniScribe (Maxtor's predecessor) 8425 (20MB) drive still working after almost 20 years. It sees a good deal of use in a Compaq Portable II, and has for several years. No errors, no corruptions, working flawlessly. Guess they really don't make them like they used to...

You have to ask how many of those died in the first 3 months of use and how many are still working now (that have not been recycled).

I have plenty of older 20-80MB drives that still work, it doesn't mean that they all lasted that long.

I think the older drives were overdesigned but had bad QC when built, newer drives are built on the edge of reliability and have better QC. So I would expect some old drives to die right away or last forever, while newer designes will probably not be DOA but on average won't last 5+ years. The heat produced by modern computers and HDs will shorten their lives too.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

I think the older drives were overdesigned but had bad QC when built, newer drives are built on the edge of reliability and have better QC.

I'd agree with that to a point. There may be a more "standardized" way of building drives (and thus better reliability), but not necessarily better (or more) QC. Years ago, there was far more competition to contend with and far fewer drives being sold. A disaster like IBM's "DeathStar" would have removed a competitor much quicker than today. IBM successfully handed the mess off to Hitachi after the class-action lawsuit; had this had happened back in the late 80's/early 90's (and had they only been making drives) then they wouldn't exist now...

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

What puzzles the heck out of me is how everybody has all these hard disk problems but me. I literally ABUSE them at times. I've had Seagates go flying down stairs at way past the 40G stress point, I've klumsily knocked over a stack of WD Caviars and not one bad sector on a single one. Here's the drives I've had and my experience with them...

My 2 modern drives, a 40GB and an 80GB Western Digital living inside the computer I'm typing on have given me no troubles whatsoever. I've had the 40GB drive since 2002, and it's still going strong as ever, literally working as a file storage drive for my home LAN.

My 286, 486, and Main Macintosh machine all run off IDE drives. The 286 has a 540MB Seagate with a disk overlay utility on it, and it never gives me a problem, and it's been in that computer since 1996 at the newest. The 486 has a 3GB Fujitsu in it, it's noisy, but nonte-theless works fine and has for a year now. And the Macintosh still has it's cruddy old Quantum, which turns out is perfectly fine, it's just Mac OS 8.0 giving me trouble when it does not find the OS because of a boot sector bug in that version of Mac OS, pertaining to letting the machine sit too long inactive.

All my laptops have no trouble, a miracle as those computers get slammed around, put under pillows, sit in the hot car for several minutes at a time when traveling, and two of the machines have been to two states already. No bad sectors, and all three laptops are still going strong.

I don't think I've had a single bad hard disk out of a Maxtor 7120AT, Seagate ST-251, Quantum 244MB Prodirve Hardcard, Quantum Fireball 540, Connor CFS420, Western Digital Caviars from 120MB-3GB, a WD Tidbit 80 (laptop caviar), IBM 540 Laptop drive, and the list goes on and on and on...I've had heaps of drives since 2001, and most of them I gave away rather than used em' till they failed. Even the ones in my main machine were swapped out for more capacity and given away in full working order. Go figure. Out of possibly 60-100 Hard Drives, I've mayve had 2-3 duds the most, and at least 2 of those were DOA.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

I don't think I've had a single bad hard disk out of a Maxtor 7120AT, Seagate ST-251, Quantum 244MB Prodirve Hardcard, Quantum Fireball 540, Connor CFS420, Western Digital Caviars from 120MB-3GB, a WD Tidbit 80 (laptop caviar), IBM 540 Laptop drive,

You're actually using some of the most reliable drives out there, at least from what I've seen.

I've only had one really "die" altogether on me...a WD 1GB from 1994 (first "big" drive I ever had) But I'd consider 12 of use years a pretty good tradeoff (even though it was around $300 when I bought it...bought a 40MB drive for a Tandy for >$600). I too, seldom have many things go wrong with HDD's once I get them running again (except maybe occasional stupidity on my part). I favor WD's, but Seagate's are OK too. I avoid Quantum's (newer than the Pro-Drive series) like the plague , and Maxtor's that were bigger than 400MB seem to be just plain trash. That's for IDE's, anyway. When talking SCSI, there wasn't anything worth having but Seagate's (Barracuda's).

I'm sure everyone else has their own favorites; those are the ones that seem to have the best luck when pulling them out of older machines. Problem is now, unless you find a machine discarded somewhere, you can't find anything under 40GB.. Mad

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

one of the very few new drives I have bought was a 20g maxtor with the ibm logo no warranty.
bu65t a neighbor picked it up for me
I used it as a D drive to store files and date and over 2-3 years, it had a FEW errors and seemed to be getting a FEW more.
finally I copied all the files i COULD TO ANOTHER DRIVE, i HAD "INHERITED" 2 SYSTEMS WITH 40G DRIVES.
i FORMATTED THE IBM/MAXTOR AND FOULD MANY ERRORS, i WILL TRY DISK MANAGER QUICK FORMAT AND A FEWE SCANDISK AND CLOSE RELATIVES. this should tell me if the drive has enough space that is error free esp at the front side to be used.

I want to try all the drivers for 2 fairly new pc's I would like to use.. as putting in and taking out drivers w/ w98 sort of screws up the system
I would also like to try setting up a windows 2000 system and see if my wife's hard ware is supported esp the scanner.,
the untrustworthy 20g is ideal for this if there is a 5-10g block still good at the front.

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

I've only ever bought 3 hard drives brand spankin' new, a 40, a 60, and an 80 GB IDE Hard Drive, all by Western Digital. Everything else has been pulled from dumpster diver computers and the like, either that or Macintosh external hard drives in the case of my SCSI drives.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

The largest HD I purchased new was an 80GB one a few years ago. I could go for some 500GB ones on my server one of these days (but I would fill them up in a week anyway).

One of the local computer sellers (works out of his apartment) is nice enough to dump all the HDs he can't use in the systems he sells (anything below a 20GB) to me. I now have a stack of 15 drives ranging from 500MB to 20GB, all tested and 100% working (I toss anything that Seatools DOS finds with more then a couple errors). Wish he dealt with SCSI drives too. Anybody want to trade some IDE for SCSI 50 pin drives?

When do you guys decide a HD is reliable to use? How do you test them out?

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

When do you guys decide a HD is reliable to use? How do you test them out?

Well, a FDISK/Format with no bad sectors is a start. Then I put it into service for 24 hours and run Burn-in on it. Then run Spin-Rite on it to make sure. The entire system then gets to play itself a game of Rebel Decade (at next to hardest setting) 24 hours. Kinda re-assures me, even if the last one is a bit quirky. If the whole thing passes, then it's definitely good enough for me...

Can't say I haven't purchased any new drives lately. Ive gotten (2) WD 80GB's from the Geeks, (2) 320GB WD Externals from Wally-World and another 160GB Seagate there as well. (Newsgroups are Hell on storage---just can't burn fast enough..... Very Happy

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Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

i never throw out a drive, my friends call me a packrat. if the drive can hold at least 10 mb than i keep it. i ran a 2 gb hdd with 500mb of bad sectors in my 386 for a while, still works, but i upgraded to 2 10 gb fujitsu hdd. fujitsu is pretty good. most my drives are fujistu.