Bad disk or kernel (ATA Driver) problem? - SOLVED

[David G. Lawrence]

> I have had spectacularly bad luck with Maxtor SATA drives.  I've already 
> RMA'd 4 of 8 drives and have 2 more waiting to go back.  1 was DOA, the 
> rest failed completely while in operation (typically locking up the 
> machine).  These were all Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y160M0 160GB Serial 
> ATA drives. After testing for power, cables, disk controller, 
> motherboard, and other potential reasons I've decided the drives were 
> just faulty and have switched to another vendor.

   Yeah, the 6Y series Maxtor is particularly bad. More than half of all
of them that I've had (a few dozen in total) have gone bad. The 7Y series
is a slightly better, but still well short of an acceptable failure rate.
   On the other hand, the Hitachi 7K250 and 7K400 series SATA drives have
worked quite well for us, with failure rates in the low single digits.
Seagate SATA drives also seem to be reliable, although they don't perform
very well.

-DG

David G. Lawrence
President
Download Technologies, Inc. - http://www.downloadtech.com - (866) 399 8500
TeraSolutions, Inc. - http://www.terasolutions.com - (888) 346 7175
The FreeBSD Project - http://www.freebsd.org
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