Hard Times
All hard drive makers occasionally have a bad batch of drives. But this site is saying they are getting a 40 percent failure rate on Seagate Cheetah Ultra-SCSI drives. I have no idea if this has been confirmed by anyone else but I would be cautious about getting one of these drives until you've done some due diligence.
Comments
Two points.
1. If you have a way above average failure rate you may have an environment problem. Like a bad powersupply or bad cooling. While it's easier to send drives back it might be a good idea to look into these potential issues.
2. Their failure rate is not on Seagate drives but on "repaired Seagate drives". (btw how do you repair a harddrive?)
A lot of these super fast drives 'fail' when they get too hot -often exceeding the operation limit. When sent back they are tested for problems and more often than not none are found. So the -heat stressed- drive is sent back to some other customer. If that customer has good cooling the drive may work fine for years, if he too has a heat problem ...
Still a problem for Seagate here, they need better testing.
Posted by: sjon | October 4, 2004 09:33 PM