[comp.sys.ibm.pc] Seagate drives

lance@virgin.UUCP (Lance Fraser) (11/22/88)

     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. One was
in warranty and Seagate replaced it without any questions. The other
wasn't in warranty, we just bought another one. My point is that
the failure rate is very low and so is the price. Use the drive's as
much as possible, if they fail buy another one, I don't see what
the problem is. The drive cost <250 brand new, if it only runs
for a year then you have gotten your money out of it.


	---lance

bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright) (11/24/88)

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

tt3x@vax5.cit.cornell.edu (01/21/90)

In article <822@edstip.EDS.COM>, ohrnb@edstip.EDS.COM (Erik Ohrnberger) writes:
> I have had nothing but good experiences with three or
> four that I know of.  20 MB one in a 9 MHz IBM AT run
> for four years continusly before it coughed a bad sector.  30MB one has run for three years without a new
> bad sector.  I have an ST-251-1 (40MB) at home that's been
> running for 1.5 years without a hitch.  It's partitioned as DOS/SCO.  less than 27ms seek avg.  I'm also looking to upgrade the diskspace, so I'd like to know
> if there are any problems with the Seagate 80MB.
> 
> 
> -- 
> -->Erik Ch. Ohrnberger
> -->Permanently Refraining from un-informed opinions


	Another good Seagate drive is 277R-1.  It's a 65 megabyte RLL
drive at 28ms.  Make sure it's a -1 though if you decide to get it cause
those are the ones that are 28 and not 40 ms seek time.  I've been using
this 277R-1 for about a year now with no hitches at all.  Quite fast 
especially with my WD1006VSR2 controller, 25 megahertz 386, and a disk
cache that blows the CoreTest 2.8 sky high!