Clunk clunk clunk clunk, whiiiiine
 

Are there any decent hard disk manufacturers left out there? If the devices don't die from suddenly in the middle of writing a paper, they start giving threatening noises of imminent death one day after they get beyond the ever shortening warranty period. None of the ones I have that were produced in the past four years have survived very long and its starting to get really frustrating. In buying disks, I now buy two of equal size and use one as an external to backup data. Not cheap, especially with the accelerated rate of decay I've seen, recently.

Maxtor: one dead, one "clunking" (head position seek issues on start)
Western Digital: bearing whining
Seagate: ? (are they still around?)

Is it time to start throwing them into arrays at home? :greenface Maybe its worth more to purchase the slower 5400rpm drives or those of smaller capacity for the sake of longevity?

I have one Western and one Seagate with some pretty serious miles on them, but that doesn't say anything about current editions of drives.

Avoid IBM 7200 rpm drives like the plague. That much, my experience can tell you.

I think the trend in drive QC is basically to eliminate it, and just replace failed drives, blaming the loss of user data on the user's failure to do backups.

Yeah, that sounds like good business policy. We'll probably see this begin to extend into other areas (didn't change your oil at 3k and waited until 4k, and your engine seized? Buy a new car! Toaster failed after 10 slices? Should have cleaned your crumb drawer more often! Etc.)

I have a Maxtor 120GB external harddrive that's about a year old and runs beautifully. My internal harddrive (came with the computer) is a Western Digital 40GB and it took about 4 years before it started making any noises. And when it did start making noises, the noises went away after a good canned-air dusting inside the box. I'm about to buy a new internal harddrive to preempt any failures the original one might be planning and I'm thinking about going with Maxtor, since the external one I got is working so well.

I decide to go with an external after having Windows lockups which were unresolvable except to use the reinstall disk, wiping the C drive.

I can plug the external into any computer. I have:

160 GB external LaCie USB drive.
30 GB Western Digital from my legacy computer in a USB drive housing I bought from Compusa.
40 GB internal from my legacy computer
40 GB internal that came with the computer.

Since 2 of the drives have two partitions, with the 4 flash card slot, the CD-RW, the DVD-RW, I use up a LOT of drive letters.

I also have an external floppy drive.

What I love about buying an external drive housing is that you open the clamshell, plug the internal drive into the circuit board and power supply, and you have an instant portable drive. You can screw the drive in, or leave it unscrewed if you want to quick swap drives. This is great for recovering data from drives from crashed systems.

The drives that are used in our machines are now all 2.5" laptop drives. It was found that they are built to withstand much more of a beating than 3.5" drives. The machines they are in are usually left on continuously. Drive failures are really uncommon after the settling in time.
Because the disks are smaller, there is less load on motors and bearings. The cabling is easy with an adaptor and they run on 5v only.

I'd like to know a little more about your setup. Who do you work for, what gear overall?

I work for a company based in Indianapolis that manufactures machine tools. The controls are PC based and have to suffer quite a bit of vibration. The drives we have used in the past were all 3.5" Seagates, Quantums and Connors. Since changing to 2.5" drives, the rate we change drives has dropped quite noticably. We use mainly Fujitsu and Hitachi drives now.

That's cool, if I could get some specs it would be cool. I may be a part of a job that could benefit from such a setup, especially the HD setup. Imagine how many hard drives you could stack in a case using SATA.

I could measure one up for you, tell you the wiring to jump it up to the standard 40 way IDE interface and tell you the specs of the drives we are using at present.
I'll measure one up tomorrow as i'm back in the office for the day.

So you guys do an inhouse wiring job after you order them?

Not really. it's just the standard 40 way IDE connector thru ribbon to the minature 40way. added is a 0v and 5v for the power. I'll dig the camera out in the morning and post a pic of it. The drives are tiny compared to 3.5" versions.

Thanks, pricey individually I bet, but if the number of replacements is significantly reduced you still save money. Sweet.

Are the PC's NEMA rated? Had they considered Panasonic Toughbooks?

Sorry about the old delay there! camera needed charging. Here's a couple of pics. The cable is just a standard 3.5" IDE to 2.5" IDE converter cable. The power runs straight in through the mini IDE plug to the drive. We use these drives in CNC machine tool controls rather than their normal laptop use.
They get left powered up continuously for years on end and are subjected to vibration and all the usual crud found in an industrial environment. The price of them isn't a lot more than their 3.5" equivalents.

Cool, thanks. Good thinking on the shock resistance.