Hard Drive brands

MTWStudios · Post by **MTWStudios** » Thu Sep 16, 2004 7:59 pm

Scintilla wrote: I believe my father got WD's in our old 386 and the Pentium or two that came after it, and never had a problem with them.

Yes he did... WD Caviars 2340 (341.2MB) and 2420 (425.3MB)... and as of acouple of weeks ago, I can still read the files off them with no problem...

The pentium (166MHz) had a WD Caviar 6.4GB which now resides in another computer, running Linux, as the only drive.... I've had no problems with it so far...

So at least our WDs lasted quite awhile...

oldwrench · Post by **oldwrench** » Fri Sep 17, 2004 5:42 pm

I have four machines running WD drives and they work fine. One I have been using in my main machine for over three years. Once I had a WD drive cause a problem, it became very slow after a couple dadys use. WD sent me a new drive within three days, I was happy with their service.
I think all the major drive mfgs make very good drives, it is just a matter of which you prefer or can afford.
It's amazing these things work at all. A few years ago Scott Mueller wrote an analogy of a hard drive in his book, Upgrading and Repairing PCs. He used a 2gb 7200rpm barracuda drive for the specifications. Magnifiing everything by 200,000 times, the head would be about 1,300 feet by 300 feet ( the size of the Sears tower lying down), floating on a cushion of air 1 inch thick, moving at a forward speed of 10.7 million miles per hour (2,975 mi per second).

It would read data bits 3.83 inches apart on tracks 5.47 feet apart. In order to have seek times of 8 miliseconds it would have to have lateral velocitys of over 420,000mph (116 mps), and instant acceleration. Thinking of the forward velocity, it would be like that skyscraper circling the earth once every eight seconds. That really makes you wonder how hard drives last as long as they do.