Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!convex!killer!texbell!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!att!alberta!auvax!kevinc
From: kevinc@auvax.UUCP (Kevin "auric" Crocker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Seagate ST-225
Summary: HMMMMMMMMMM!!! ST-225
Message-ID: <769@auvax.UUCP>
Date: 18 Nov 88 18:27:55 GMT
References: <1717@questar.QUESTAR.MN.ORG> <4617@bsu-cs.UUCP> <90@usl-pc.usl.edu> <628@flyer.apctrc.UUCP>
Organization: Athabasca U., Alberta, Canada
Lines: 34

> I think the reason I've had such good luck is that I do frequent backups.
> Murphy's Law 2.3.6.7, Corollary 6, Paragraph 3.a, Subsection 1: The probability
> of failure of a given disk drive is proportional to the cube of the time since
> the last backup was made.
> -- 
> George Lehmann,  ...!uunet!apctrc!zgel05

Well, since George quoted me I feel obligated to respond.  I also
believe in Murphy and I do frequent backups.  I do a full backup every
month, I do update backups every week and I also do a partial backup on
the directories that have changed every day.  So what.  All this means
is that when the drive goes I probably won't loose much.  I am not
questioning the drives reliability so much as I am expressing an
opinion that the noise makes me feel like the damn thing is going to
not only die but jump out of the machine and grab my throat.

The drive sounds like it is unreliable.  I've had it now for about 5
months and other than some loading problems nothing has gone wrong,
YET!  I regularly need to power down the machine ( i.e reboot, since I
have no warm boot mechanism) several times every day.  I do a lot of
intensive disk writes and reads on the order of about 100 every day so
I think that I give the disk a pretty good work out.  I can't afford to
have 40Megs of data and programs disappear because I inevitably loose
at least a day in restore.  The last drive I had ran for just about two
years and it had a MTBF of (Ithink) 30,000.  If this one runs for as
long then fine I will apologize, but I still will feel that the drive
is unreliable until the day  it dies.  Prejudice is hard to overcome,
especially when we are talking about hardware.

Well, that's my $20,000,000,000 worth which at current market rates and
expected inflation rates is worth about $.02

alberta!auvax!kevinc (Kevin "Auric" Crocker Athabasca University)
Do our employers have opinions or is that what we get paid for!