hey! i didnt say that IDE was specifically unreliable! heck, most disks in 
the past decade are all the same with different logic boards attached! 
i do say though that just about anythign made in the past few years i 
wouldn't trust. It's all of the low-cost,low-quality genre which makes 
even the 'high performance' models suspect. I was just extolling the 
virtues of the late CDC disks, notably the Wren-7 as i mentioned, which has 
been a paragon of indesctructibility in my experience. They stand up to 
physical abuse, water, electrical anomalies, poor power feeds, cold and 
hot, and i've not lost a single bit of data from one yet.  

most any disk made in the past few years, though, i woudlnt trust. 

just my $.02

isildur

On Tue, 11 Jan 2000 allisonp@world.std.com wrote:

> 
> 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]
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
> 
>