Amazingly little got done...

[mdlbear]

...all weekend. I was mostly trying to get my Mini-ITX board into a case; due to a sequence of miscalculations and poorly-thought-out operations with the tablesaw (i.e., get a great idea, cut the wood, then try to make it all fit -- naturally, it doesn't), the blasted thing is still sitting around naked. I may just throw money at it, which will get me a small case, if not a quiet one.

And Fry's latest ad has IBM 120GB drives going for $100, which works out to $0.83/gigabyte! Should I hold out for $90, or go for it now?

Comments

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Ah, personally... I'd stay the flying wet slap away from IBM IDE hard drives these days. The Deskstar didn't get named the Deathstar for nothing.

(Disclaimer: In theory, I should be biased. I work for Maxtor. OTOH, I will be up front when our drives suck too... and the 75GXP's that we got for "competitor testing" went 3 for 3 on catastrophic failure.)

[mdlbear]

Thanks for the warning. FWIW I own quite a few IBM drives, both IDE and SCSI, and have only had trouble with one (a 20GB IDE drive, repaired under warranty). I've had several problems with Seagate drives, including a couple that just quit completely without warning, and my Fujitsu SCSI drive ran hot and started making worn-bearing noises after a year or so. The Fujitsu IDE drive is still humming away.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Deskstars have only had that particular problem within about the last year and a half; for all I know, it's specifically limited to the 75GXP, but it sure scared me off their desktop products. (I heavily recommend them for SCSI though, along with Quantum Quantor er, Maxtor.) I understand that their more recent products are okay, as were their older ones. The problem was, the 75GXP was a five-disk drive, in a standard form factor. They tried to cram too many disks in an attempt to stay ahead of the curve on storage density (on which they failed anyway; Maxtor's 80GB drive shipped at the same time.)

Seagate... well, let's just say that my experience echoes your own.

Fujitsu scares the hell out of me, after they finally admitted their reliability problems. They've made some good drives, don't get me wrong (especially in the laptop segment) but they still make me nervous.