[Semi-OT] Gah, sometimes, I think hardware vendors plan failure...

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

I swear this POS was meant to betray me.

This laptop was a gift to me from my father in law. It of course had problems. It was well taken care of for a luser, but a real luser had managed to damage the LCD while he was on an Amtrak by throwing his seat back while the laptop was in use. So I went to a local computer recycling shop that had a used LCD, put down the cash for it, him and I replaced some hinges to get the screen to mount, we're in business.

I take it home, put in a spare 40 gig hard drive I hadn't used in a while since I didn't have a laptop to put it in. Fire it up, partition it, format it, throw XP on it, start installing a bunch of stuff, then start noticing it's having some problems - namely it's stuttering, sometimes freezing for a few seconds, sometimes a minute or two. What's up with this? Hmmm. Then I notice the hanging on startup and shutdown. Ok, let's pull out Scandisk. Hangs on that. This isn't good. Out comes Seatools. Immediately fails.

Good news - it's a Seagate with a nice warranty. Bad news - it's still a POS.

Gah.

Comments

[jecook]

I was not aware that Stealgate made notebook hard drives.

With notebook drives, I try to stick with Toshiba, Hitachi (aka IBM Travelstar) and the odd WD.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Did IBM make notebook drives before the Hitachi merger? WD is usually my choice for desktop drives, but decided to give Seagate a try after having got what I paid for on a Maxtor and seeing the SG with a decent warranty on sale at CompUSA. The fate of the laptop that it came out of before this one was not pretty :).

[jecook]

I think.

Hitachi bought IBM's hard drive division at some point, but was still allowed to make the drives under the IBM name.

I'll add Maxtor to the list above, at least for desktops. I do know that I will stay the hell away from Fujitsu desktop drives, though. After seeing at least three with the infamous "thermal controller defect", I pretty much blacklisted their desktop drives.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Maxtor is not somebody I'd suggest - I'll say they are good about RMA's and that's about it :). I had three drives RMA'd under a single warranty until it ran out and the final replacement drive died about three months after that. I still have a Quantum drive going in one of my older boxes made before Maxtor bought them out.

I think I'll always be skiddish about IBM hard drives after the Deathstar series of drives, regardless of form factor. I agree Fujitsu is also right out.

[sketchydave.livejournal.com]

I'll never forget a quote from a buddy of mine:
"Maxtor makes great drives, so long as you don't care about your data."

My 2nd hard drive is a Maxtor. The drive I use for rendering digital video, Photoshop scratch disk, MP3s, etc. Basically its my junk drawer and my main drive is something higher end.

Of course no one ever knows which hard drives are the best since they keep changing, getting bought out, etc. Thank god for Toms Hardware

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

seen storagereview.net?

[sketchydave.livejournal.com]

I have now! Thanks for the tip.