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Hard Disk Quality: Luck of the Draw?

If you read the technical groups on USEnet for any reasonable length of time, you will see people post saying "what is a good brand of X", where X is any type of component. When "X" is "hard drive", the results are usually pretty easy to predict: virtually every major manufacturer will be mentioned by at least one person as being "great" and by another as being "horrible". The end result is that you have no idea what to do. Why does this happen?

The simple fact of the matter is that most major hard drive manufacturers make very high quality products, and most hard disks provide their owners with years of very reliable service. However, all manufacturers make the occasional bad drive. If you happen to buy one of these, you will experience a failure, and in all likelihood you will hate that company and avoid their products from then on, perhaps with good reason. The problem is that many people will generalize this very small sample size into "Brand X sucks", when this very well may not be the case. They just may have been unlucky with what might in actuality be the best drive on the market.

There are many ways that a hard disk can fail. The one that usually comes to mind first, the infamous "head crash" is not the only way or even necessarily the most common any more. There can also be problems with bad sectors showing up on the drive, for example. Many people don't think of this, but the integrated controller can also sometimes be the culprit for a bad drive. See this section in the Troubleshooter for specifics on drive failures and possible solutions.

Next: Service Life

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