I've had a few drives fail, none of them WD actually. A Seagate (seems to be unable to calibrate as it keeps spinning up, choking and doing it all over again), a Maxtor (freezes while reading anything from the last 20% of the drive) and a Quantum drive (heads ran off the side of the platter making a horrible noise, in the midst of backing up the drive no less -- only half the backup had succeeded, fortunately I make regular backups and didn't lose more than 2 or 3 files).

BTW, have you tried not using the BIOS autodetect? It wasn't always reliable and some drives would work perfectly but could only be configured manually.

All HD's are unreliable.

I personally have had the best luck with WD HD's.

Yup, HDDs are pretty unreliable, though some tend to work a bit more stable then the others. The best experience so far I had was with Maxtor DiamondMax 45+ and 60+ (the last "Maxtor" HDDs before renaming Quantums and selling under Maxtor name). Im running a RAID 0 out of 4 of these right now; I hope none fails anytime soon 😀

elfuego wrote:

Im running a RAID 0 out of 4 of these right now; I hope none fails anytime soon 😀

Yowza! That will increase speed quite a bit, but also gives enormous potential for catastrophic failure. Surely you're not keeping anything important on that array, at least not without proper backups I hope?

I've had bad luck with WD caviar drives, especially from the 486 era.

For older drives I prefer Quantum. The Maxtors, while not the fastest or quietest seem to hold up pretty well. The Maxtor 7213AT in particular seems fairly reliable.

I don't know what to say for drives larger than 1GB, they just don't seem to last. As the OP mentioned, Maxtors were pretty good until they started relabeling Quantum drives. Quantum drives were good until they went 7200rpm. I specifically blame the KA series for the downfall of the company.

IBM drives were also quite good until the 75/60GXP series. (glass platters)

I agree with the IBM's - my 9.1gb 7200rpm IDE dont-know-series from 1998 is still working fine(?), after nearly 11 years of daily(!) abuse as a C/ drive...

I'm keeping it in, even if it constantly(!, even idle) whines like a high pitched 50's refridgerator, just to see how long it takes to actually fail.
Granted, I don't have winXP on this one(win98 only), so any obscure failures are invisible to me, but still....

(OTOH, my WD 80GB JB model from 2002, different PC with XP, has lately been giving off an increasing number of errors, showing in the event viewer logs, like 15 consecutive "controller error"s, type/ID 11 - maybe time for a backup and replacement?)

Kippesoep wrote:

elfuego wrote:

Im running a RAID 0 out of 4 of these right now; I hope none fails anytime soon 😀

Yowza! That will increase speed quite a bit, but also gives enormous potential for catastrophic failure. Surely you're not keeping anything important on that array, at least not without proper backups I hope?

Yup. Windows XP loads up in about 10s, Win98 in about 8s (when no Sound font is loading at startup) and DOS... Well... Didnt measure really. 1s or so 😀
All of that on a KT133a machine...

And of course I have nothing of importance on the RAID array, apart from operating systems. But they can be reinstalled easily as I'm keeping track with a backup drive. I've already had some broken arrays in the past and I've been making backups ever since 😉 I learned the hard way 😒

Kippesoep wrote:

BTW, have you tried not using the BIOS autodetect? It wasn't always reliable and some drives would work perfectly but could only be configured manually.

Yes I did try that - I used the parameters written on the sticker on the HDD. Unfortunately it didn't work. I tried something else too - I tried using a different mobo. Strangely, the mobo did recognise the HDD, but after a reboot "forgot" these settings, and I subsequently had problems again. Strange. It's not too important, as I have enough old drives for experiments.