Ah, foo.  I have 6 systems at home running IDE disks all old and smaller
than 500m.  At work I have 40 clients and 2 servers with IDE disks, many
with more than one disk.  While I've made great efforts to insure cooling
is good I cn also say reliablity has neem that I've only one failure in a
year (really old WD2120).   Most fo the drive are in teh 500m to 4.3gb
range and of the system 18 have disks that were new in last May as I
upgraded a bunch of system for disk space reasons and reused the old 535mb
drives in other systems.  The drive mix includes IBM, JTS, WD, Quantum,
Maxtor and Seagates (mostly).  I can't support you claim IDE is
unreliable though for the other two server we opted for SCSI for maximum 
reliablity and other considerations.

The drives I've had fail over the years (20):

 St506 (3)
 St412 (2)
 St225 (1)
 ST251 (everyone I ever had, 5)
 Micropolus 13xx (head bumper stick, 4).
 CMC (all bad crashes, 3)
 and a few of the really old stepper ST157s.

Allison

> IBM disks perform, but in my general opinion, very few 3.5" disks are to 
> be trusted, and most of them are 5400 RPM disks by virtue of the much 
> less heat they put out. HP disks in general have seemed overly prone to 
> head crashes, and maxtor ESDI disks are also pretty hard to hurt. Alas 
> that theyre not that big. Micropoles (plural of micropolis? :) are decent
> but their later 3.5" disks i've not had the best of luck with: one burned 
> after only 4 months, one blew up some curcuitry, and one had a head 
> crash. When they work theyre very nice, though. I'll swear by the CDC 
> Wren's and the 5400 RPM hawks of '94-'96, though. Capacity and speed are 
> secondary to indestructibility in my opinion. 
> 
> just my $.02
> isildur
> 
> On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, J.S. Havard wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Well, I've seen them all die.  I've had every single brand I have ever
> > seen have atleast some sort of fault.  Newer quantums, I haven't seen
> > problems, except their IDE drives.  In one machine, I had three fail, in
> > two different systems.  Seagates SCSI drives have "issues" when booting
> > off an SS4.  If you ask me, I think all hard drive manufacturers could
> > stand to improve everything.  The only brands I really trust are IBM, and
> > Compaq.  IBM, I've only seen just one drive have a few bad sectors, but
> > the thing just continued to kick on, and the drive was over 10 years old.  
> > Compaq, only two drives, but Compaq will replace them, at their cost,
> > including shipping, which is only right.  Just my opinion.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > John Havard
> > 
> > > On Mon, 3 Jan 2000, Bruce Lane wrote:
> > [snip]
> > > with that, but I never did understand anyone saying that the drives were
> > > unreliable.  From the oldest 40Meg Conner drives, to the more recent >10GB
> > > drives, I've never ever once had an IDE drive die on me.  Never ever, in
> > > the span of a whole decade.  However, in the past five years I've had more
> > [snip]
> > 
> > 
>