Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!mcnc!rti!bcw
From: bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Seagate drives
Summary: Your experience is FAR better than mine!!!
Message-ID: <2591@rti.UUCP>
Date: 24 Nov 88 13:46:30 GMT
References: <2261@virgin.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC
Lines: 30

In article <2261@virgin.UUCP>, lance@virgin.UUCP (Lance Fraser) writes:
> 
>      I have installed approx.  500 disk drives at customer locations
> in the past five years.  If I have a choice and price is not a concern
> then I use Priam hard drives- I think they are the best and I have never
> had a failure.  If price is a concern (and it usually is) then I use the
> Seagate family.  I've used about 400 Seagate drives and about half of these
> have been ST225's. Of the >200 I have bought only 2 have failed. [...]

Your experience is FAR better than mine.  We have had 3 drives installed
at any one time for about 2 years.  During that time we have gone through
perhaps 8 to a dozen different physical drives;  this on machines which
have surge protection and are never moved from their tabletops.  It never
seems to be the media that goes, BTW;  it always seems to be the on-board
PC board.

Price gets to be an issue when you have to buy a new drive every 6-8 months
instead of every couple of years (as implied by this article).  I don't
know what the exact problem is - as noted before I suspect it has to do
with the age of the drives (we generally replaced with Seagate-refurbished
drives because the number of failures made other approaches seem unattractive).

The Priam drives are pretty good - one place I did some work for used them
quite a bit & although we had some problems and had to write a bad-block utility
program (we were using them on a non-MS-DOS environment, and couldn't use
the Priam supplied bad block information ... this is one of my objections
to the Priam drive, the other being cost;  Priam tends to assume you are
using MS-DOS only), we had very few actual failures.

					Bruce C. Wright