allred@ut-emx.UUCP (Kevin L. Allred) (07/06/89)
I'm about to put down money for a fast hard disk and 1:1 interleave controller. I've been planning to go with RLL formatting because of its higher throughput and capacity. One of the best priced combinations I have seen is from Hard Drives on Page 339 of the July Computer Shopper, an ST277R-1 (same as ST251-1 but RLL certified by Seagate -- ie. doesn't void the warrenty to format it RLL) with a WD1006-SR2 (Western Digital 1:1 RLL FD/HD controller) for $529. I probably would have ordered this already except, I have read and heard from computer sales people, that Seagate has a 4-6% failure rate on hard drives within the first few months of opperation. Although a drive that fails in the 1st year is still under warrenty, the thought of data loss and down time is unappealing. I have also heard that MTBF is on the order of 30,000 hours for Seagate drives, but on the order of 45,000 hours for some other comparable drives. It would probably be worth it to pay a little more for a drive with a 50% longer expected life span. A lot of the sales staff in the area refuse to put RLL drives in the systems they configure, siting higher failure rates than with MFM. Judging by past discussions of RLL in this news group, I personally think they are just trying to get people to buy bigger MFM drives or go all the way to ESDI, because that means a bigger commision on the sale. I would like to hear from you if you have experience with the price/performance/life of hard drive from various manufactures, or if you know where I can get a better deal than the one mentioned above from Hard Drives International. I would also like to hear if you know any thing more about RLL verses MFM failure rate than has been posted to this news group within the past few months. I will post a summary in a week or two. Kevin Allred allred@emx.cc.utexas.edu allred@ut-emx.UUCP -- Kevin Allred allred@emx.cc.utexas.edu allred@ut-emx.UUCP