Re: [tlug] Seagate Sudden Death....

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

The 80GB Seagate drive - I pulled it out of the computer today and put 
in an old 10GB Maxtor that is on the noisy side, but works fine.  One 
design note - if the drive died due to heat (it wasn't excessively used 
and died in the early spring though...) I wonder if the design with the 
chips all under a steel cover helped lead to their demise.  In contrast, 
the Maxtor has the chips exposed to sight and to cooling air within the 
computer.  The Seagate was the quietest drive I've ever used, but if the 
price of an ultra-quiet drive is sudden death and instant loss of all 
60GB of data on the 80GB drive, then a little noise could be tolerated.
   On the steel cover it says: "This SeaShield (TM) helps protect your 
drive from electrostatic damage and makes installation easier."......

Also, a couple of years back, there were reports in The Register of 
sudden-death Fujitsu drives and the cause turned out to be a bad batch 
of (Conexant?) chips that were dying under heat (um... hard drives get 
hot, so it would nice if the component parts were designed to deal with 
that fact...).

Sorry for the lack of focus above - but here are some details of the 
Seagate drive - if you've got a similar drive, be sure to have things 
backed up at all times so a sudden-death of the drive doesn't take your 
data with it to the bottom of the dark, cold sea....

Seagate
Barracuda ATA IV
Model ST380021A
80 GBytes
16,383 Cyl - 16 HDS - 63 Sect - 156,301,488 LBA
P/N: 9T6006 - 301
HDA P/N: 100165033
Configuration Code: SBG - 09
Firmware: 3.19
Date Code: 03295
Site Code: AMK
World Wide Web http://www.seagate.com

One last question, will Seagate at least give me a new drive after their 
faultily designed drive vaporized all my data?  (Much of it was backed 
up, but not all....)

Lyle