Browsing through this thread this morning I thought "must have been a WD drive..."
> I have the invoice here: purchased 2 December 2009. It's a WD drive so > certainly still under warranty. Until I read this... I have been experiencing sudden fails of WD drives since the 1980s or 1990s, we used to have them in student workplace PCs together with other brands during the 1990s (until I switched to thin clients without HDDs). Yes, I remember there was one Seagate drive that needed shaking (no kidding!) sometimes to get it starting, and a Conner drive with too many bad sectors after a couple of years. But WD drives failed regularly. Sometimes there sealing got away so humidity came in causing random bad sectors at different places, sometimes the motors failed. They used to be the fastest and yet most quiet HDDs of all, but not very reliable. Since then, I try to avoid WD drives. A Maxtor HD never failed, but boy they were loud then :-) so I used them for servers only, and now I have some Samsung drives running without problems though forums tell a mixed story. When you buy a ready-made USB backup drive, you have no choice. So I use a Sharkoon stand for SATA drives where you can insert the naked HDD. Samsung pack their drives in nice transparent plastic containers which I use for transport. I leave the HD in the stand for the whole week. Backups are monday to friday night, so next monday I bring another HD from home and swap them. Up to now, this went flawlessly. Power for the HDD stand is switched on and off by a clock, and the only thing I have to look for is that it has been switched on when backup begins (so the drive is there to be mounted) and switched off not too soon. Regards Rolf _______________________________________________ Dirvish mailing list Dirvish@dirvish.org http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish
