Is this PC doa? (was a formatting question)

[Mark]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 12:51 AM, Basil Chupin <blchupin at iinet.net.au> wrote:
>
> Yea, which is what I was implying.
>
> The HDs I am talking about are actually Maxtors - and Maxtor was
> acquired by Seagate which is why I had to use Seagate SeaTools on them.
> The drives are still working and still do not display any SMART error
> messages and SeaTools still shows that they are OK.
>
I used to swear by Maxtors until I had one that crashed a head and
lost a few files (because a friend of mine in my company's IT
department at that time used a $5000 disc recovery hardware tool and
restored 99% of the files.  Those few that were lost were gone.

> On the other hand, in September 2009 I bought 2 Western Digital 500GB
> HDs, which went against my instinct, and neither showed up any SMART
> errors except that one morning when I switched on the system the whole
> sheebang did not boot. Why? Because one of these you-beaut WD marvels
> simply failed - no SMART messages, no nothing, just didn't spin up. It's
> still under warranty by I cannot have it replaced because it contains
> very sensitive personal data which I can only destroy by doing an HD
> scrub used by the military and which would void the warranty. So, the
> fate which awaits this HD is a 3Kg sledge hammer.
>
Too bad - I have two WDs in my box now and they're behaving flawlessly
even after close to 2 years each.

> (And I won't mention the 2 Seagates I also bought. both of which failed
> and both which were replaced but one of the replacemants decided in a
> less than a week to go belly-up and would not accept at being the Main
> Drive in an installation but (I think) accepts to be the Secondary Drive
> which does not contain the bootable, main, system.)
>
I've heard nasty remarks about Seagates, too, which makes their
swallowing Maxtor that much worse.

My latest is a Hitachi, which I've heard is a cut above all the
others, but most people seem to agree that they're all pretty much the
same - sometimes you just get a bad one.