The best disks made in recent history are CDC disks. The Wren-7 is hands 
down the absolute most reliable disk I have ever seen. This lived on 
after Seagate bought their disk division, as the ST41200. I have a stack 
of these chugging away for years now in a microVAX, as well as a couple 
hanging from a DECstation 5000. Almost as good are the last CDC disks, 
the Seagate Hawk series of the mid '90s. very reliable. The barracudas 
are almost as good, but suffer some heat problems. I've seen micropolis 
3.5" disks burn up without too much effort, ive seen many a newer Quantum 
7200 rpm disk overheat and die (including one which was baked by a 
barracuda, which survived unscathed!), i cant say ive seen how the newer 
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]
> 
>