[Ilader]

We have purchased two dozen large external hard drives for backup, Maxtor and LaCie, over the past three years. We have experienced a 25% failure rate during the three-four months each drive was in service. These drives were well cared for, in a cool environment, with good power sources. We had no failures of the many computers in the same machine room. None of the drives had a fan, and all felt quite hot. All the drives used similar external power supplies, which also had no fan and felt quite hot. We found that sometimes using a different power supply would “revive” a drive. Those couple of “better” power supplies became our standard supplies, and we have had no failures in the eight months since.

I find it insulting that vendors and manufacturers claim that these drives have a low failure rate. It also makes me worry that they are not working hard to make them more reliable. After all, I don’t care about the past failures, I just need reliable external backup drives for the future. What I’d like to hear from some manufacturer is that they’ve figured out all the reliability problems, and have fixed them in their new model, as proved by their new extended warrantee. They’d get my business, even though long warrantees are no use to me – the drives are only in service a few months before being stored.