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by making_things 2209 days ago
Remember when drive makers were constantly looking to one-up each other on reliability? Those were the good 'ole days. Bad press for consistently losing users' data back then could put them out of business. Now they're so big that even uber amounts of bad press and deliberately shipping inferior products can't do that - they'll pay a few million dollars in fines and go right back to doing what they were doing.
3 comments
kalleboo 2209 days ago
Honestly no I don’t, as far as I remember it has always been a competition on price and capacity. Maxtor, IBM DeathStars, neither killed those manufacturers (IBM lives on as HGST, Maxstor as Seagate). Maybe it was different in the enterprise markets, but Red wasn’t an enterprise drive.
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tw04 2209 days ago
Deathstar absolutely killed IBMs disk business. Hitachi bought that for a song.
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csharptwdec19 2209 days ago
Sounds like a lot of rose colored glasses there.

It typically took a really, really, really bad debacle to get that level of attention. Back when I was selling hardware, I can think of a few incidents where certain drives were just known for data loss.

Early WD IDE 20GB drives - absurdly high 90d failure rate. Shop stopped carrying WD for over a year after these

Quantum Bigfoots - At best slow, and not -terrible- for reliability but I remember them having a really nasty failure mode.

IBM Deathstars - Everyone knows about these.

Fujitsu drives in the 8-30gb era - I think these actually wound up having a lawsuit over them

Heck, back then, on top of having to worry about all of that, Creative lab sound cards could cause data corruption in some motherboards!

And yet, only IBM suffered severe damage. People kept buying bigfoots. People kept buying Early model WD drives that bit them. People kept buying creative labs cards that had bad bus mastering....

$$$

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dannypgh 2209 days ago
In the late 90s on efnet's #computers we used to say "don't get a maxtor, just write your data to a dead fish instead. It's cheaper, and you have about the same chance of reading your data back."

I am curious as to when these good ol days are for you.

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