Have we outwitted ourselves, or am I just jinxed?

[KRSESQ]

I'm beginning to pine for the old days of 40 MB, 500 MB, & 4 GB hard drives. Why in God's name, do you ask? Because despite the awesome increases in capacity (or maybe hand in hand with it) I believe there has been a quantum increase in UNreliability.

I have a dozen hard drives kicking around my shop ranging from 1.2 to 6 GB and I use them almost daily, reformatting and reinstalling operating systems as the need arises to diagnose this or that. They lie scattered about without so much as an antistatic bag to protect them. I can grab one at random secure in the knowledge that it will ALWAYS boot, without having to worry about a single bit (literally) of lost data or a single bad sector. Contrast that to the 40, 80, 120, 200, or 250 GB drives I see on a daily basis that have bad sectors all over the place, that crash and suffer catastrophic data loss by the gigabyte if you sneeze anywhere in the room, with little hope of recovery.

As you may have guessed by now, I've fallen victem to a major data loss, on the 200 GB Seagate I got myself for Christmas. 6 GB of audio files gone. Hopefully I'll be able to recover something but right now I hold little hope.

The only alternative explaination I can think of is that there is a massive magnetic meteorite under my house which is wreaking havok with these already-hopelessly-fragile devices. The only hole in this theory is that my magnetic compass works fine.

So, opinions, please. Am I on to something, or am I just getting paranoid in my old age?

I recall Leo Laporte on "The Screen Savers" once asking John Dvorak what operating system he'd use if he wanted to be absolutely hack-proof. Without batting an eye Dvorak said "MSDOS 5.0."

Kevin

[Brian Ellis]

I've got various fairly modern drives from 30 Gb upwards to 80 Gb that have given sterling service, day in and day out, for up to 3 or 4 years, without so much as a hiccup. OK, I haven't got any super-big uns, but I set up a RAID 0 array with two 60 Gb disks when these were state-of-the-art. I use this as my video drive and this has never given me a second's angst.

Do you remember when a 40 Mb drive was greater than MS-DOS was capable of handling? Now, THAT was the days of unreliable drives. And I disagree with Dvorak; MS-DOS 6.2 was the best ever O/S. I used to programme with an enhanced FORTH language scientific DOS proggies and I went through the lot from when DOS was PC-DOS, through DR-DOS, to 6.2, supplanted by that abortion Win 95

[Flying dutchman]

I think the reliability of a data medium is in some way proportional to the physical size of its data structures.

[landrover]

I can´t say drives have become less reliable with increasing capacity, neither so have they become more reliable.
I believe I´ve had 2 HDD failures in 15 years, once a 1 1/2 year old 60 GB and once a 2 year old 1.6 GB.
B.t.w. the 60GB drive, a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9, failed during a HD benchmark test, which really p*ss*d me off and made me even more cautious with benchmarking tools.

[Marshmallowman]

I do think there is a reason why most hardrive manufacturers reduced their standard warrranty to 1 year.

[landrover]

That´s true, but Maxtor, who were the first to take that step, have gone the opposite way again and extended the warranty period for their latest series.

[VJ]

In 6 years time, I've had 2 drivecrashes and one that said it was going to crash.

The first disk crash was of an IDE disk (Western Digital, 32 GB or so, apparently those models were notorious for crashing), all data was lost.
A 9 GB Quantum Atlas 10K just stopped responding to everything (it did spin up, but just as a blank unpartitioned disc, so this was probabely the PCB failing); it was replaced under warranty. Again, all data was lost.
Later, an 18 GB IBM UltraStar 36lzx (also 10K) said during POST it was failing, and advised me to back up the data ASAP. It was my bootdrive, so booting became an issue, but I manage to salvage all my data. This drive was also replaced under warranty (turned out the internal vibrations were to much). Hint: enable SMART! Some PC vendors disable it as they claim it causes errors.


So I wouldn't really blame the decreased warranty (the SCSI drives all have 5 years).

I would think we are edging closer to can be reliably made (physically, sort of the same way of thinking as Flying Dutchman). Consequently, the smallest deviation of any part will now yield errors, whereas I can imagine that in ye'ol days there was much more room for error (I have 3 420 MB Caviar disks, still running after 11 years, despite being used in mobile racks).


Jörg

[lenl1]

A year ago I purchased a 40 Gig Maxtor and within 3 months it quit on me. I RMAed it and the second one lasted 3 months. I sent it back to them and told them I wanted a different model otherwise keep it. They sent me back the same model and I ended up giving it to a friend but with a warning. It brand new and you can have it but no give backs. So far I think he still has it. I ended up buying a couple of seagates 80 Gigs and put them on a Raid.
So far so good.

Lenl1

[UtwigMU]

I had WD1200JB stop booting and having bad sectors.

I was able to salvage all data and RMA it.