They used to make the best scsi mac peripherals before they made monitors.

Unfortunately, by the time I've soak-tested a hard disk for 5 years you probably can't buy it any more!

I used to swear by IBM for hard drives, until I bought 3 death stars... My original 4GB drive must be over a decade old though, and that's still giving fantastic performance for it's age. It's actually just as fast as the 256MB DRAM in that particular PC, so when the swap file kicks in it barely slows down!

Next I swore by Maxtor, but I had three ELFs from them too. I lost a lot of valuable porn. Luckily, broadband came to Piddle under Puddle soon after so it didn't matter.

I won't touch WD because we had massive problems with them failing back in the 1990s.

The Lacies are usually OK if you don't use them. They'll sit on standby in a cool room for years. If you thrash them by doing a full backup every day, they cook themselves because of inadequate cooling. It's a common fault with external drives. YMMV.

I have said it before and I'll say it again, "Death, tax and hard drive failure - the only things guaranteed in life".

Hard disks are mechanical. They will all fail eventually. If the MTBF is 5 years, some could last for 20 and some might only last 3 months. It's roulette.

Some drives turn out to be far more reliable than others, but it's always down to a specific model made in a specific factory at a specific time. You can't say "Brand X is reliable" unless you have a time machine to check out their latest model in 5 years time.

Touch wood (actually, Contiplas) my Samsung F2 is still performing perfectly from a mechanical point of view. Damned annoying that the NTFS filing system has corrupted so many times though...

The Empire's looking for you.

Mark

Setting myself up for a massive fall here, but I've never had an actual hard drive fail, just problems with the chipsets in external ones.

Surely the church of X404 is large enough to accommodate such a thing?

I suppose I could review some anti-snoring remedies...

Joking aside, please do. I slept on the sofa last night as a result of my snoring....

For the first time since I started using computers all of my data is backed up, or at least on a disk in a mirror.

I bet they were built by contractors