Western Digital 250GB, Maxtor 250GB Worst Drives ever made

[Andy Louie]

Here at the local medical center we use it to store medical
information of data files, x Rays and other pertinent information.
Fortunately we do back ups.. these drives either Maxtor or Western
digitals [all the ones we get from CompUSA] and have it in a 1394
Encloures.. we run them quite.. am sure you know how cool we have to
get for blood testing... and in spite of that it still fails no matter
if they are on a NAS or stand alone 1394 drive on a desktop for the
medical officers. Of the 60+ drives we get since September close to 39
of them have failed after 4 months and even after receiving the new
ones from Maxtor or Western Digitals they still fail after a month and
they were all shipped from Malaysia and some remote countries. I am
wondering why these drives cannot be reliable. I have never seen
drives performing like this. The originals ones were all Retail
versions from CompUSA, NewEgg, TigerDirect, etc... someone should do
somthing.

AL
Information Systems

 

[CJT]

Here at the local medical center we use it to store medical
information of data files, x Rays and other pertinent information.
Fortunately we do back ups.. these drives either Maxtor or Western
digitals [all the ones we get from CompUSA] and have it in a 1394
Encloures.. we run them quite.. am sure you know how cool we have to
get for blood testing... and in spite of that it still fails no matter
if they are on a NAS or stand alone 1394 drive on a desktop for the
medical officers. Of the 60+ drives we get since September close to 39
of them have failed after 4 months and even after receiving the new
ones from Maxtor or Western Digitals they still fail after a month and
they were all shipped from Malaysia and some remote countries. I am
wondering why these drives cannot be reliable. I have never seen
drives performing like this. The originals ones were all Retail
versions from CompUSA, NewEgg, TigerDirect, etc... someone should do
somthing.

AL
Information Systems

I'm sorry to hear that, because I just bought a couple.

How do they fail? Are you sure you don't have power or other problems?

 

[Ron Reaugh]

What is the failure mode? Others haven't reported this.

 

[J. Clarke]

Here at the local medical center we use it to store medical
information of data files, x Rays and other pertinent information.
Fortunately we do back ups.. these drives either Maxtor or Western
digitals [all the ones we get from CompUSA] and have it in a 1394
Encloures.. we run them quite.. am sure you know how cool we have to
get for blood testing... and in spite of that it still fails no matter
if they are on a NAS or stand alone 1394 drive on a desktop for the
medical officers. Of the 60+ drives we get since September close to 39
of them have failed after 4 months and even after receiving the new
ones from Maxtor or Western Digitals they still fail after a month and
they were all shipped from Malaysia and some remote countries. I am
wondering why these drives cannot be reliable. I have never seen
drives performing like this. The originals ones were all Retail
versions from CompUSA, NewEgg, TigerDirect, etc... someone should do
somthing.

Yes, someone should. You specifically should find out what is killing them.
Either the enclosures you are using do not provide adequate power or
cooling or they are being mishandled by your users.

I _do_ find myself wondering why you have over 12 terabytes of storage
scattered around on peoples desktops on consumer-grade drives in 1394
enclosures instead of using a proper server.

 

[Bob Willard]

Here at the local medical center we use it to store medical
information of data files, x Rays and other pertinent information.
Fortunately we do back ups.. these drives either Maxtor or Western
digitals [all the ones we get from CompUSA] and have it in a 1394
Encloures.. we run them quite.. am sure you know how cool we have to
get for blood testing... and in spite of that it still fails no matter
if they are on a NAS or stand alone 1394 drive on a desktop for the
medical officers. Of the 60+ drives we get since September close to 39
of them have failed after 4 months and even after receiving the new
ones from Maxtor or Western Digitals they still fail after a month and
they were all shipped from Malaysia and some remote countries. I am
wondering why these drives cannot be reliable. I have never seen
drives performing like this. The originals ones were all Retail
versions from CompUSA, NewEgg, TigerDirect, etc... someone should do
somthing.

AL
Information Systems

Wow. Extremely valuable data, parked on commodity hardware under
control of commodity software -- sounds like bad judgement to me.
Whatever your management saved on technology is likely to be spent
several times over on legal fees to defend against the class action
lawsuits sure to come.

 

[service]

The drive mfg's must love it when one guy keeps sending back dead
drives.


Hire someone smart.

 

[FransHals]

Here at the local medical center we use it to store medical
information of data files, x Rays and other pertinent information.
Fortunately we do back ups.. these drives either Maxtor or Western
digitals [all the ones we get from CompUSA] and have it in a 1394
Encloures.. we run them quite.. am sure you know how cool we have to
get for blood testing... and in spite of that it still fails no matter
if they are on a NAS or stand alone 1394 drive on a desktop for the
medical officers. Of the 60+ drives we get since September close to 39
of them have failed after 4 months and even after receiving the new
ones from Maxtor or Western Digitals they still fail after a month and
they were all shipped from Malaysia and some remote countries. I am
wondering why these drives cannot be reliable. I have never seen
drives performing like this. The originals ones were all Retail
versions from CompUSA, NewEgg, TigerDirect, etc... someone should do
somthing.

AL
Information Systems

Wow. Extremely valuable data, parked on commodity hardware under
control of commodity software -- sounds like bad judgement to me.
Whatever your management saved on technology is likely to be spent
several times over on legal fees to defend against the class action
lawsuits sure to come.

True. Maybe the hospital should buy some professional RAID arrays and
hire some professional people to run it. I hope they have better
surgeons.