[geeks] HP announces EOL for AlphaServer systems

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 12:01:26PM +0100, Bjorn Ramqvist wrote:
> Sandwich Maker wrote:
>
>> you'd think this would let seagate out of the 'club', but their
>> higher-end drives - hawk/barracuda/cheetah - trace their ancestry back
>> to cdc.  you'll still find cdc drive specs on their site.
>>
>> my experience with seagate has been excellent.
>
> Agree on that.

I also have had great experience with seagate drives, starting with my
first ST220 back in the 8086 days.  Used it in a few different systems
up through my Amiga 2000, until I finally got a 2091 controller and
could use SCSI disks, then I got another Seagate. =)

I didn't buy them for a while, just due to cost, but now that they are
competitive on their ATA offerings, plus the 5 year warranty, I buy them
when I need a new disk.

> My current (newly replaced) drive at home is a Western Digital.  So
> far it's cool, fast and quiet, but I don't know how long it will last.

My last failed HD was a WD, lasted almost 5 years as the boot drive in
my Windows desktop PC.

As to the Deskstars, from what I remember, it was that one model of 75
gig drive that had all the problems.  I had a few Ts of their larger
drives (185G) spinning at my previous gig, plugged into 3ware 8 port
RAID cards.  Out of the 100 or so that we had, I think maybe 1 was DOA,
but the ones that worked out of the box, just worked.  Had more problems
with the 3ware cards than I did with the drives.

I think most of the chronically bad drives are off the market.  Quantum
Fireball SCSI -- didn't support reselection, worked fine if they were
the only device on the chain, but if you put two disks, just hope you
never had one disk with heavy I/O, might lock the bus, or heaven forbid,
you had a tape drive and tried to do a backup.  Conner?  Saw one RAID
where they had to replace a drive a day, from the day they brought it
up.  After they'd replaced every drive in the array, they bitched at
their vendor till they were able to replace them with Seagates.  Then
Seagate does a beautiful thing and buys out Conner and takes them off
the shelves forever! =)

The companies left have all had their share of problems, but for the
most part, I think the players still on the field are were the ones that
constantly outperformed the ones that have faded into the ether.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org