🚀 go-pugleaf

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| Mark Shepherdson    EMail mark@etec.demon.co.uk             
| Egton Technical Services - Telephone 0113 270 9742  |
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Hi, I just thought I'd stick my two pence worth in here. I a technical
support engineer for a medical information systems company, and over 
the past two years hard drives have been a total nightmare for us.
Here's a breif rundown on some of the 'issues' we've had to contend 
with...
Conner - don't touch with a barge pole, even if they offer you a free 
drive. I know a lot of people like Conner but try getting it to co-exist
with another drive on the scsi bus - your in for a headache and Conner 
support will promise you great support, but you never get a call back.
Micropolis - these drives last on average eight months before falling 
over, these drives cost us a fortune.
Seagate - five sample units from UK distribution were tested and 
ONE survived the day.
IBM - some good some bad, I must admit these drives are quick, I don't 
really have enough exposure to them to say much.
Quantum - these die after around six months. IDE and SCSI are C**P
HP - UK manufactured HP drives work fine, be aware that the higher end
units are rebadged IBM or Seagate units (manufactured for HP with LOTS 
of changes).

Why do we kill so many disks ?
We use a multitasking multiuser environment (MUMPS) running under DOS. 
Yeah I know this is a Linux group but our system has a typical duty 
cycle of 85% on hard disk access during the testing phase, when it gets 
to a customer site the disk light is on almost solid. Our application 
keeps full patient records and also finacial data on disk so if it 
falls over $"%^$*& !!! one really annoyed customer (yes we do back up 
overnight). 

Support issues
Some of the responses we had from manufacturers support 
teams have given us a good laugh. Conner said that one problem we had 
'Couldn't possibly happen on a SCSI device' when they were told we had 
20 + machines in production and ALL their drives showed the problem 
they promised to send somebody out to see for themselves. Three weeks 
later we had not heard any more from Conner and were quite happily 
shipping HP drives without any problems. So good were the HP drives 
that we moved all our hardware requirements to HP Netservers. We have 
had manufacturers trying to get out of their warranty obligations by 
saying we were shipping the drives back to them without correct 
packaging, problem with that train of thought was that we were 
returning the drives in the same boxes they shipped them to us in !

Is there really a moral to all this ?
Well no and yes. The only rule of thumb is 'you get what you pay for'.
If you're on a limited budget, and who isn't running at home, go for 
the most expensive drive you can, not the largest capacity for your 
money. Drive manufacturers in the main are commercially led and have to 
compete in a very big market. To get the cost down and capacity up they 
do seem to cut corners a bit too far. I know many people won't agree 
with some of my comments here, but they are my experiences in the last 
couple of years. I don't for one minute lay the blame for these 
problems soley at the drive manufacturers feet, distribution seem to be 
demanding cheaper product, certainly here in the UK anyway, and some 
companies support is sadly lacking in many areas, 'I only know DOS - 
Iv'e not heard of Unix' as an example from one 'techie'. I do run Linux 
on a Seagate drive - it was free, and so far I've not had a problem 
(six months old - very light usage) so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. 

These are my personal opinions, so if any driver manufacturers read 
this and aren't happy with what I'm saying - tough. You should have 
given us a good product with good support.