OT: How long should a capture disk last??

[paulw]

Hi all.

Over the past few weeks my 20 Gig Seagate capture disk has been doing odd things. I have finally pinned it down to the drive and have spent a frustrating nite rescueing a project from it over to another drive.

Question. How long is an average IDE capture life life for the average home user?? This drive is exactly 12 months old and according to the Seagate.com the warranty expires in July 2003. I could go thru one of these every year at this rate and get a remanufactured drive back every time..

Thanx in advance..

[KRSESQ]

Paul:

Seagate claims a Mean Time Between Failures of 500,000 hours.

I daresay most of us here haven't been alive for 500,000 hours!

Kevin

[Dr Mordrid]

That sounds like a Seagate. I stopped using them a long time ago for quality reasons. Had several go bad.

I've only lost 1 Fujitsu in the last 4 years (which was replaced by FedEx in 2 days flat) and no failed Maxtor or IBM drives.

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 08 May 2001).]

[This_Idiot]

I'd agree. Drive technology is getting better all the time. In all the time I've been running Hard drives on personal computers (some 20 years now), I've only had 2 fail. One was a "hard card" - in the days before HD controllers were commonly found on PC's, it was possible to pick up an expansion card that had a controller and HD on the card. These cost pretty much as the same as the "PC" itself. I won one in a competetion that had the tremendous amount of 10Mb of storage capacity - which was about the same as some 30 5 1/4" 360Mb floppies (Yes, I know, I was lucky I'd got double-sided double-density FDs). It had a 12 month warranty and lasted 13 months. By then, technology had moved on and I had to replace with a 30Mb unit that cost about a third of the original. Needless to say, the OS couldn't cope with the sheer size so it had to be partitioned into 2 smaller logical drives. (sound familiar ?)

The second one was a 1Gb Quantum that's been lurking about in the bottom of my spares drawer for an aeon or so. It was pressed to use in the Kids machine, but recently decided to throw in the towel. I don't blame it, the smell of dirty socks and sweat in their room is enough to corrode anything !

On the other hand, I'm still using a 3Gb Fuji MPA drive in this PC which has been booted up full time (except for machine hangs and the occasional upgrade) for some 4 years. I don't have any MPBs, but several MPCs which are still going strong, an MPD and a pair of IBM GX75's that are barely broken in !

Chris
(T_I)

[paulw]

Thanx guys. This_Idiot. I didn't think that there was any one alive who remember hardcards!!

[This_Idiot]

OhBoy

Time to duck - I think the Doc has several dozen plugged into his Atari rendering farm

Anyway, I'm young considering many of our esteemed colleagues out on the forum. I sometimes think I should note down their birthdays so I can carry on sending commiseration cards each year. Doc's got about 10 years on me although he swears that his eyesight is perfect and that he still has (most) of his own teeth. Pushing the envelope even further is Brian (the terrible), who I swear only visits the forum to try and make himself younger. Brian hasn't actually mentioned his teeth, but as a Septuagenarian living in the middle of the Mediterranean on a diet of demi-sec wine and figs I reckon that his dentist must either be as busy as hell or unemployed (Oh stop being grumpy Brian, gizza kiss - but put yer teef in first).

[Patrick]

Oh gawd, I'm not reading THIS thread any more!

[wkulecz]

Since the drive makers honor their three year warranties without hassle, its pretty clear they expect them to last at least three years.

I don't think video does anything "unusual" to the drive. If anything, the rather long sequential reads of video clips should be "easier" on the drive than the many seeks and reads of small files like in a data base, web server, or mail spool.

I think you just got unlucky. Over the years I've gotten bad drives from every maker. I also know my sampling is insignificant to claim my experience can suggest who "makes the most or least reliable drives".

--wally.

[KRSESQ]

TI:

How many hours is that?

Kevin

[Dr Mordrid]

hehehe....

ALL of my own teeth and 10/15 vision last checkup

Just two hard-cards here on the Amiga/Toaster systems and a s***load of PCI RAID arrays on the PC's. Got so many Promise cards there are at least 4 of 'em sitting in a box on the shelf.

Dr. Mordrid

Dr. Mordrid

[Technoid]

500000~50+ years

Can't read the screen from more than 5 inches without glasses.

When I hit 50 I hawe to use binoculars to se the screen

[This_Idiot]

There's 8760 hours in a standard year. I think that this is a measure that isn't open to interpretation across American, Australian, British and European measuring units.

[Algernon]

I have a 20 gig seagate barracuda...first one packed up after 1 month...replacement started going wobbly after 6 months, but I noticed they were running very hot. I put a fan to blow directly on to it, and have had no trouble since. You can get dedicated hard drive cooling fans now.

[Technoid]

My 3 IBM drives usualy stays within 5 degreas of 34 degreas celcius.

It's not that they hawe any choice, 90*90,2500RPM fans.

[xortam]

V