On Sun, 17 Aug 2003, walt wrote:

> I have an older WDC WD450AA which has gone bad on three different
> occasions and recovered each time -- but very slowly.
>
> Each time the disk remained bad for weeks or months -- it was
> only a secondary disk so I was too lazy to yank it.
>
> I've concluded after three episodes that turning the power off
> was the event that triggered the recovery.

I had a WD 80gb that would silently write erroneous data whenever it
got hot. After significant activity, archives or large files that I'd
just copied to it would fail their checksums, and fail the comparison
with the originals. I never detected any errors after the data was
(finally) correctly written. I now avoid that brand like the plague.

Frederick