A Pox on Seagate
This is me over here singlehandedly keeping the storage industry in business. I've burned up 3 Seagate Cheetah 15K SCSI drives in two years. No mas.
Is the box hot? Not really. It's a Lian Li aluminum full tower with 6 aftermarket fans. No overclocking, nothing to incredibly fancy. CPU runs at 41-46C. Two 39CFM fans blow directly on the 3 SCSI drives. Nothing else has failed in three years. I've been grinning and bearing it all using an Adaptec 2100s RAID card that I've had for a while. Frankly, it's great to find out a drive is going to die or that you can rebuild the array, but I don't have a supply of cold spares so it's only partially saved my ass on the unfortunately several occasions I've needed it to.
But my ass wouldn't need that brand of saving if the Seagate drives weren't going belly up every time I turned around. I'd had it the second time, but going with lightning probability assessments, I figured I was in the clear until I replaced this machine outright.
Negative. In any event, hopefully this all becomes moot when I install 3 new WD SATA drives in a new Athlon 64 in a couple weeks.
I will say this though, after the first few drive failures, you really stop getting as upset about it. I am wondering if the MTBF on a Seagate Cheetah is actually greater than or less than its published average seek time.