fjd@imagen.UUCP (Fred Drinkwater) (12/29/87)
A couple of weeks ago I posted a query about possible reliability
problems with Seagate ST251 hard disks. My questions were
prompted by some disturbing information in MicroCornucopia
volumes 38 & 39, which suggested that a lot of these disks
were failing within three months. I am happy to report (especially
since I had one on order at the time) that the responses have
been uniformly favorable:
From Dominick Samperi ihnp4!cmcl2!manhat!samperi:
I've been using two ST251's in my AT compatible for about 4
months without any problems.
From David F. Carlson atari!ames!rochester!ur-valhalla!micropen!dave:
We standardized at this site aver a year ago that *all* our 40meg
drives would be ST251's. With several machines running UNIX 24 hours
a day we have yet to have any downtime or any new bad blocks on any of
our ~6 ST251s. In short, a very good and reliable disk for my money.
From Karl Denninger hplabs!sun!laidback!karl@ddsw1.ARPA:
Got a dozen or so in the field and no problems so far at all.
Ages run from 2 weeks to 6 months or so.
Other similar reports...
Only one complaint:
From Angus Wang atari!ames!cs.duke.edu!aw:
I have one of these in an AT clone and have had no problem with it
but it does have, in my opinion, a large number of bad tracks. It
came that way so there's not much I can do. I had mine in almost
continual use for the first 3 months working on a development project
and used up about 10M for data and programs. This project involved
a lot of reading and writing to the disk so I feel that if it was
going to fail, it would have done so by now. ONe thing I dislike
about the 251 is that it has a long average seek time.
(Regarding the above: speaking as a former disk controller designer,
my experience with various drives between 36 and 120 MB was that
a typical drive would have from 10 to 20 bad sectors found by
the manufacturer and reported on the drive's rap sheet. Those
manufacturers who handled bad sectors by flagging the entire
track as bad, we chose not to do business with. The manufacturer's
test procedure typically found 2-3 times as many bad sectors as
did the low-level formatter (because the mfg uses analog tests).
I never had a sector go bad after receiving a drive, for which I
am eternally grateful, since most OS's just panic if that happens.)
Fred Drinkwater {ucbvax,decwrl}!imagen!fjd
Disclaimer: The opinions above are not those of my employer or
my cat, who has more sense than to expose himself to a libel suit.fjd@imagen.UUCP (Fred Drinkwater) (01/06/88)
A couple more comments on Seagate reliability or lack thereof:
I did not see your original query about the Seagate drive. While I cannot
comment on that particular drive, I do know for fact that PC's Ltd, the 7th
largest PC maker in the US, has dropped Seagate as a supplier due to an
in-field failure rate that exceeded 11% earlier this year. These were
machines that passed burn-in at the factory but did not work for the
customer. Given PC's Ltd's habit of taking any kind of junk for the right
price, and the fact that Seagate was cheaper than the alternative, this alone
says quite a bit... Bear in mind that each PC's Ltd. comes with a 1 year
on site maintainance contract, so PC's Ltd had to pay a service tech to
visit most of the failed drives, and you can imagine what that cost.
I personally own a Seagate 4096 that seems to work fine, so your report is
somewhat reassuring. My only problem with mine is that the Novell COMPSURF
disk tester constantly picks up random errors everywhere at the rate of
30 per 100,000 accesses, which is somewhat unnerving.
---
James R. Van Artsdalen ...!uunet!utastro!bigtex!james "Live Free or Die"
Home: (512)-323-2675 Work: (512)-328-0282 5300B McCandless, Austin TX 78756
******************************
From: Urs Probst <amdahl!uunet!mcvax!solaris.ifi.ethz.ch!probst>
I have now my second ST251. The first worked 9 months without
any problems. But one day, the drive-motor didn't turned...
I suppose, it was a mechanical problem of the auto-head-return
mechanism. Fortunately, the drive still was under warranty, and they
gave me a new one.
But I had problems with other Seagate harddisks too:
I purchased a ST238 for a friend, but I had to send back the first and
the second they sent me. Final, the third ST238 functioned!
You see: Seagate doesn't have a good quality-control...
Good luck!
Urs Probst
ETH Zuerich
Switzerland
**********
Caveat Emptor, and don't lose those warranty papers, folks!
Fred Drinkwater {decwrl,ucbvax}!imagen!fjd
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed above are strictly those
of the author(s).