It's dead, Jim

[unixronin]

Further to the previously mentioned saga, by last night the restored whitestar was acting erratically again, and by this morning it's unbootable.  My initial suspicion was correct; the disk is definitely losing data.

So now I get to figure out if there's any way I can run Seagate's requested seatools on it (I'm guessing not, because I'm guessing the tool is Windows-only and requires MSIE), and get the drive RMA'd.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The Seagate was the least expensive 2.5" drive I could find at the time, or I wouldn't have bought it. Personally I've been fairly favorably impressed with Samsung drives for a while.

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

I had a 3.5 inch 3.2G Samsung -- years ago, mind you -- that was utter crap. I scrapped it and haven't purchased Samsung products since.

IIRC, it was about 60% of the price of an equivalent WD drive -- and worth every cent I paid for it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The Samsung SP1614C I put into vorlon in 2005 is still going strong. It's always been very fast and silent, and has really never given a problem aside from some mild stiction on cold starts in the depths of winter. Part of the difference, I think, is it was designed from the start to be an SATA drive, rather than as a PATA drive with a SATA interface bolted on to get it out of the warehouse.

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

This was an IDE drive, probably dating from about 1999 or so.

I replaced it with either a WD or Seagate.

Best drive I had was a 12.5G IBM drive -- built like a tank, ran forever until it got caught by a voltage spike. I was happy that the HD was the only casualty, at that it was a major pita.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, I've bought a lot of IBM Ultrastars in my time...