I've always bought Maxtor because it was cheaper... but am I at risk of hardware failure!? Well, it finally happened. I was getting Quake 2 going when the computer began to freeze up because the harddrive couldnt access. It made a really series of noises before I had to shutdown and reboot a lot of times (I'm guessing it was a physical hardware failure, because it hasn't shown up much).

The same thing happens every couple weeks. Harddrive trys accessing and it fails, and so windows crashes and the computer freezes. Sometimes I have to reboot a lot of times, I think time much be the issue after the harddrive has failed.

After running a diag program on the drive, it failed the re-certification. I'm supposed to send it back, but I don't want to wait and haven't done it yet.

Are there any other cheap hard drives out there? IBM, or whatever? (this was 40 gigs)

I've got an old 800mb Maxtor (about 8 years) and it only has a few bad sectors.... but still works as new!

I just (like a day ago) had a 4 year old Maxtor fail on me. Always remember to backup, children!

that is why I have one more junky small hdd for dinamic backups.

This is a real example of one of the problems that windows has in comparison to other operating system.

You'll probably find that the problem lyes in the "Conventional Memory", the inferior Swap file.
Basically your computer uses RAM and this Swap file to open files, if the files are larger than your free RAM they use the Swap file.
Installing things that continues installation after a reboot actually uses the swap file.

The swap file is in constant use by a windows system when you open new programs, or leave the computer with something like a word document open for a while. (Autosaves etc)

It's known that if the area the swap file is assigned to gets bad sectors then your system starts having boot problems.

There are a few things you should take into account:

Increasing RAM can lower Swap drive usage, but RAM is expensive (but fluctuates in price now and again).

You could go out and buy a multiheaded drive for speed, but if you buy something with 40+Gb's make sure you Partition it if your using windows, that way you can defrag the partitions one at a time and don't have to sit there for a few months waiting for it to finish.

(Infact the main windows partition is the main one you need to defrag, on my system I have 2gb partion for windows [might need 3 now] and 1gb for a swap drive the rest of the disk I use for storage and any programs I install.)

You might be best continuing to buy cheap harddrives, purely because they are getting larger in size and if you fork out now for one, you could get the same size in a years time for 3/4's the price.

(Personally I would get a cheap one and just purchase a CD [or DVD] burner, that way I can store my data if it did crash.)

You might also like to think about using a linux system, as it runs a bit differently in how information is stored in the machine (through the use of Superblocks)

what Linux do you use, Stryder?

Well, obviously RAID (mirrored) is the optimal answer to avoid data loss. And, given how cheap hard drives are these days, it's quite reasonable to have two drives in a RAID configuration.

I was looking at my receipt, and I paid $700 (CAN) back in '98 for my 11.5 GB Maxtor that died. Luckily I got an extended warranty, and so in exchange I got a 20 GB drive that retails today for $150 (CAN).

I used to work for a hard drive company. My advise is.

IDE - Buy Western Digital
SCSI - Buy Seagate

No you can't get any cheap junk as far as I know. They are all cheap but certainly not junk.

I'm already using linux, I just use Windows for almost everything because I haven't gotten completely used to linux yet. I can install stuff, compile, I know all about security (well not 'all'), and filesystem, and administering... But I've used windows for about 10 years (and i'm only 17) so it's imprinted in me :)

I like slackware myself. I install all the gnome libraries because some programs need them, but I leave all the rest of the gnome and kde stuff because i don't like 'em. For a window manager I use fluxbox.

So you're saying that linux swap partitions won't fail like windows? (No surprise there)

Slackware was the original linux, I don't know what that means for superiority (prolly nothing), but it's what I use regardless. I've used redhat and mandrake but it was just the little things that annoyed me after using slack for so long.

I wouldn't say Maxtor is cheap junk. At this point they are certainly staying up on technology. They are currently the only company in the entire world making drives on the ATA-133 interface, and drives with liquid bearings (very quiet).

Of course this is not necessarily to say that their drives don't go bad more often. I don't really know.

Western Digital, they have a way..... ahem.... I would say - they intentionally bug their drives to go bad on the date the warranty expires! They may put the date in the ROM chip (firmware/flash memory). Then their replacement drives are the same way (I've heard they last no longer than 200 days).

And just because they can add an 8MB cache to their larger drives doesn't make them some kind of king.

I really can't say much about IBM (except one person said their original release of the Deskstar series, which he called "Deathstar" especially the larger drives, used to crap out all of the sudden for now reason, like as soon as a month or two after being installed, though I can't substaniate this claim).

Samsung, they make cheap drives in my opinion. They like to make larger drives at 5400 RPM. But they are in all kinds of storage business (they make RAM/memory and stuff as well).

Just remember, no harddrives are bullet proof. People have different opinions, and some people lie. As Porfiry said, don't forget to backup.

i had a maxtor; it failed. lost everything on it. damn cheap peice of nasty hardware. would'nt recommend them to anyone.