Storage Toolkit

Story: Hard disk upgrades

Posted by: Infernoz (Sunday 24 April 2005, 1:56 PM)

I would strongly recommend avoiding all IBM/Hitachi Desktar model hard disks e.g. my IBM Deskstar 120GB IDE drive has loads of bad sectors and one out of three Hitachi 7K250 160GB SATA (March 2004 batch) failed (click-of-death), after only 6 months, with a catastrophic head crash. A data recovery professional said that the surface was so scratched (over a wide area) that it would probably destroy replacement heads from a matching donor drive.

The drives were both kept in well cooled cases, so IMHO this is piss poor performance, it's probably because Hitachi hasn't fixed the flakey platter design so allowing a chain reaction of fatal damage. IMHO Hitachi should dump the Deskstar family and design something which is reliably.

I've now switched to RAID 10 with Seagate 7200.8 drives now, with true SATA, NCQ and a 5 year warranty. I'll never knowingly buy another Hitachi product again!

BTW: Freecom classic USB drives can contain Deskstar drives, so beware.

I am not happy that many external drive manufactures do not say which make/family of drives they use, it makes it hard to avoid crap drives unless I build my own. It would be nice if LaCie provided empty drive cases as I do not want 5400rpm, Fujitsu or Western Digital drives.