[Tfug] In need of hard drive info

[Bexley Hall]

--- On Fri, 12/26/08, Harry McGregor <micros at osef.org> wrote:

> In a lot of ways I prefer to buy an external enclosure and
> a drive separately (from SWS or NewEgg), than to buy a bundled
> set.  I can then figure out which part has failed, and deal 
> with it, instead of a single monolithic warranty claim...

Note that many "drive failures" are really *not* actual
failures necessitating "replacement".  E.g., if you look
at incoming RMA data from many of the drive vendors, a
*huge* percentage of "returned drives" have "no defect found".

Of course, this applies to just the bare drives.

So, obviously, all those customers had *other* issues that
were not really drive related (software, controller, power, etc.)

My point is to reinforce Harry's -- you *really* want to be able
to decide if you have a real *drive* issue or something else
that manifests itself as such.  Being able to move the (bare)
drive around is a big win in this regard.

E.g., I just "repaired" a 120G drive that *seemed* broken when it
just needed to be re-certified/initialized, etc.

(SMART reported no problems yet the drive misbehaved in a very
reproducable way)

While you might be able to afford the restocking/service fee,
you may not want to risk losing what's *on* the drive even
if the manufacturer is willing to "replace" it!