Re: Formating and reinstalling WinXP Pro on a Inspiron 530

In news:gvbqsd$spn$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
Ben Myers typed on Sun, 24 May 2009 11:59:06 -0400:
BillW50 wrote:
In news:gv9i2n$2n6$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
Ben Myers typed on Sat, 23 May 2009 15:16:38 -0400:
[...]
Yes, I guess you are right. I've had two brand new Seagates fail.
One would not even get through the Windows install before going
dead. ... Ben Myers

Were those OEM Seagates with very limited warrantee? As I heard and
coupled with my own experience, that Seagate dumps their iffy
manufactured drives to the OEM market. So sometimes you get good ones
and sometimes you get a lemon.


I bought OEM Seagates with not-at-all limited warranty. Distributor
replaced them. Shook my faith in Seagate though.

Hi Ben! Well IMHO, Seagate has two quality standards. Those with the
full warrantee and those with little to none. And I suspect those that
they feel might not last too long, unloads them to the OEM market.
Usually with little to no warrantee. The first evidence of this is when
a company used OEM Seagate hard drives for Commodore interfaces back in
the 80's. Things were going well at first and they sold thousands of
these things.

Then the horror started! As 99% of them had the head stuck to the
platter problem. This occurs when too much oil sits on the edge of the
platter and gets cold and is stuck between the head and the platter.
This acts like a brake and the motor doesn't have the power to break the
two apart.

And this poor little company had thousands of angry customers. And there
was no way they could afford to replace all of them. So they asked
Seagate to replace them. Seagate basically told them bad luck, you
bought them you keep them. Nothing good came out of it and the customers
ended up replacing their own drives. And I never cared much for Seagate
ever since and I never forgotten to what they did.

Today if I have a choice, I'll try to avoid Seagate drives. Although
those retail versions I feel are trustworthy. But you pay a premium for
them too.

Where can you turn these days for a drive with good quality and
reliability? By default, I've begun buying WD. We'll see how they
do. WD is perhaps the only drive manufacturer that has not grown
through acquistion of other companies.

The very first hard drives for consumers that I ever heard of was WD
drives. They were 10MB. I liked them too. But they couldn't take a
bounce well at all. But then, no other brands back then could do so well
either. I just had a lot of WD drives back then. This must have been the
early 80's.

Seagate bought Maxtor, lock stock and barrel, and still sells the
Maxtor schlock drives under the Maxtor name, even as external backup.
You have to wonder whether the poor Maxtor reliability is not oozing
into the Seagate drives like a cancer. (Of course, way back when
Seagate bought Magenetic Peripherals (MPI), the MPI people lamented
to me that they were worried that Seagate would kill MPI product
quality. MPI was noted for producing old-time canister removables
and then SCSI. Seagate SCSI quality has not eroded, as far as I can
tell.)
Hitachi bought IBM's drive operations, which produced great drives
for a time, and poor quality "DeathStars". I'm skeptical about
Hitachi.
Toshiba, manufacturer of laptop drives with a high failure rate,
bought Fujitsu's drive operations recently. Fujitsu drives have been
excellent for years in my experience.

Samsung got into the hard drive business almost 10 years ago with some
awful drives. But Samsungs show up in a lot of the Korean-assembled
computers like HPaqs.

So we're down to five manufacturers of hard drives. Which one do you
place your bet on?

... Ben

Well I predict we are seeing the end of the hard drive era. And after a
bit more of a shake out, none will be left. And solid state drives will
replace them all. For better or for worse.

--
Bill
Asus EEE PC 701G4 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC
Windows XP SP2


.

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