[Leica] OT: external hard disk size

[scott at adrenaline.com (Scott McLoughlin)]

Go online and check MTBF numbers. I haven't shopped drives
in more than 18 mo's, but I recall that the 10K RPM drives
(not the biggest ones) also generally had higher MTBF specs.
Also shop SCSI drives for high reliability (but check the #'s).

Of course, the reliability route is not anywhere close to consumer
$$/MB kind of figures.

Scott

Brian Reid wrote:

>> This question is directed mainly to Brian, who previously has stated 
>> that
>> buying hard disks larger than 250 GB was an iffy proposition.
>
>
> At any given time in the disk marketplace, there is a "leading edge" 
> capacity, designed to hold market position, and a "most reliable" 
> capacity, which is typically 6 months to a year older. It is purely an 
> issue of manufacturing quality control. Disk manufacturers are very 
> eager to get their latest and greatest out into the marketplace, and 
> are willing (though they will never admit this) to back off very 
> slightly on the QA of the newest size, in the interests of 
> time-to-market.
>
> I am still using 160GB drives for my backups; I have about a dozen of 
> them, but they're in a cabinet in the garage. If I were going to buy 
> disks today, I would buy the Seagate ST3300831AS 300GB Serial ATA. In 
> my opinion, 400GB drives are still not quite reliable enough.
>
> Many computers and their BIOSs have trouble with non-serial ATA 
> interfaces to disks bigger than 160GB. Check before you buy. SATA is 
> enough faster that it's worth adapting your computer to it. 
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information