Yeah, the DiamondMax Plus 9 is the drive you're referring to I believe. I've had both PATA and SATA versions of those drives fail. At the same time I've got 250GB DiamondMax 10s (the first drives on the market that supported NCQ and a few other cool SATA2-specific features) and those, like the 7200.10s, are still running to this day after a decade of 24/7 service.
All manufacturers at some point had a bad run of drives. It's just the nature of the business.
While I may paint a line of drives as being bad (e.g. the 7200.11s), I won't do it to an entire manufacturer. I would hope others would do the same.
While I may paint a line of drives as being bad (e.g. the 7200.11s), I won't do it to an entire manufacturer. I would hope others would do the same.
7200.11 -- were those the wonderful Seagate drives that might fry their firmware at random during any powerup, depending on the phase of the moon?
I agree, though. If I was making a decision about buying 10,000 drives for a corporation or a production run of PC's, I'd want to have some pretty good hard data on which to base the decision. But one drive for one computer, meh, it's OK to say I've always had good luck with them, like the looks of it, and like the warranty. I'm just amazed that WD can stay in business with such disproportionately high pricing, at least for the "Black" series.
I agree, though. If I was making a decision about buying 10,000 drives for a corporation or a production run of PC's, I'd want to have some pretty good hard data on which to base the decision. But one drive for one computer, meh, it's OK to say I've always had good luck with them, like the looks of it, and like the warranty. I'm just amazed that WD can stay in business with such disproportionately high pricing, at least for the "Black" series.
The WD Black is a fantastic drive, I just don't think it demands the price premium over comparable drives of a newer design. WD is feeding off the perception that people still have toward Seagate to artificially inflate their prices, despite the fact that the latest Seagate 7200RPM drives are in many ways better than the Black.
Though, I will say, the fact that the WD Black is (in he the computer world, anyway) an old design that is still fast shows just how amazing it was when it came out a few years ago. I'm really surprised they haven't refreshed the line though, as the only thing I can find are FAEX drives that are the exact same thing as the 1TB drive sitting in my computer that I bought over two years ago. I know that they're planning on releasing SSHD under the WD Black and WD Blue banner, I just have no idea if that is the only replacement for the line or if there will be a magnetic-only version in the future as well.
I was working for the Shack when those drives were around.
Remember a 25-1029 or 25-1032 or 25-1045? Old "hard card" drives? They were WD drives with controller on them.
Damn you Don, I had forgotten those numbers
The last ones came in as a 20mb single platter drive.. slow as molasses.
I used to make a killing on those things, call up everyone who bought a computer from me at Christmas to tell them at $1,099 a 40mb hard drive was on sale.
While we're being nostalgic. How about an Apple Profile? a 5 or 10mb full height Shugart hard drive inside.
I used to work on Xerox 8010 hardware, they ran with the belt driven 8" platter Shugart drives. Like this: »www.digibarn.com/friends ··· dex.html when those heads crashed there was no doubt with the noise they made.
We'd probably be worse off. Ever tried to use one of their business copiers today? Sheesh! Talk about a bloated, incomprehensible mess! I get better results with an HP multifunction printer!
We'd probably be worse off. Ever tried to use one of their business copiers today? Sheesh! Talk about a bloated, incomprehensible mess! I get better results with an HP multifunction printer!
I had to get one running in an office with network scanning.. boy that was fun.
