Failure

[senshi]

One of the least though of but the most dependent thing that your system requires in conjunction with other bits is the... Hard Disk.

My Girlfriends just failed today and I have had about 8 hours of stress and fustration and 'How long is it going to be for F***'s sake!...' and other irrational female rantings. She has no appreciation that things take time, the recovery utility gave up because their were too many errors, the pattern of all the errors matched the typical useage of her drive.

You see, its as simple as thins, she filled up and kept large sections of her hard disk with large files on so that vast arears have not been used but other arears have been thrashed to bits and as a result the heads as far as I can tell have given up, some data is retrievable, about 2.8 gigs off an 18 gig drive, so the failure is pretty big considering she kept the drive best part od 85% full. Something I told her and warned her and yelled at and stressed about and got to the point I was teaching the cats how to defrag a Hard disk....

So she wonders why the bloody thing fails, through misuse and general disregard for the fact that putting your drive into a situation where you can hear clicks and pops coming from the drive, you ought clear out lots of space and give it a good old defrag... did she ever once let me near the thing long enough to do the job, most of the times she would cancle the job because she wanted to use the computer to do her stuff.

By know most of you will be wondering. Yeah I have a steel plate in my forehead, the front lobe gave way years ago, from fustration I might add, this is the Second hard disk to buy it this way and I often wonder IF all my efforts to keep her system running smoothly is worth it as its like giving a watchmaker a 5 LB lump hammer to fix a swiss watch with...

My point, I dont know, you tell me, I just keep running out of brick walls to demolish because some people are what I consider blinkered and like a freight train with no brakes.

I will say this for nowt, One day it will happen to you, mark my words.

[Foxified]

drvies are getting cheaper.. so replacing one can be easy, UNLESS its a laptop, oh then, your gonna shell out $$$
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[senshi]

When they are at a realistic price I wont be complaining too much, the fact that we pay over the odds here in the UK anyway, I have still to find a decent priced HDD which gives good capacity, access as all I have looked at cost approx 50p per Gig and the cost per Gig is allot lower than that, something in the order of atleast 50% less than that would be what I call a good price for a HDD.

It all depends where you shop too, my girlfriend went out and priced up 2 drives, both were 40Gig and the local retailer was £3 chaeper but even at his prices, he was still approx 92.5p per Gig.

I have worked in various industries and can say that having had my eyes open to mass manufacturing, the cost of these items is relatively small because of the vast quantity in which these things are manufactured, IM guessing know but would put the cost perg gig at a few pennies for the manufacturer otherwise it wouldnt be worth their time and effort in making them.

The other issue is reliability, these things can be fine and last 10 years or more, I have a 1.2 gig connor drive thats 12years old and still works fine, I had a Seagate Drive and it lasted 12 Months. another lasted 7 Years, so reliability is an issue. Current price drops in memmory has made the FlashDrive Market more affordable and I can see people wanting to use them for mass storage, a current 40Gig FHDD will set you back an easy £140, the issue is access speeds, being slow dont offer much in access times like hard disks but as a backup device, access via USB, you cant go wrong because theirs no moving parts.

Thats why I say HDD's are too pricey, IM definately going to invest in a FHDD as soon as I have the funds.

[Foxified]

ur getting ripped.. under 100 Euro can get me ... 80gbs. v.v


its actualyl cheaper, to get something like a 120gb hd for.. comparitivly cheaper, and just a bit more then normal average size drives..


and seagate sucks ass
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[olly86]

I got a 120Gb Maxtor drive in the UK for about £80.00 so it's not all a rip off

try EBuyer...
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Olly

[senshi]

still 66.7p a Gig

thats the whole issue with sotrage, the price per gig, for the past 10years the prices of HDD's has not dropped whilst the technology has progressed leaving a short fall in the actual market which is kept artificially high.

If were going to see REAl prices, a typicla HDD would be in the order of around 25p a Gig, manufacturing cost is minimal seeing as the same dies and lathes that produce these things are all pretty much the same pattern.

It still wont get around the reliability factor, I have 4 paper weights on my table, each one is a different age, I have tried several manufactirers and yeah, Maxtor comes out on top for me to, I have waved good bye to a Western Digital Drive, a Seagate Drive (well 2 of them) and a Hitachi drive and I have only ever had on Maxtor drive fail on me and that was according to the diagnostics the drive was damaged in the first place so it doesnt really count as a failed drive.

[Anonymoose]

160gb @ £59.99 inc VAT = 36p / gig.

Can't really complain at that...

Komplett.co.uk

[senshi]

Bloody good price, where from? Internet or Shop?

[goose]

my drive is bloody hard and cheap!!!! now where are me peeps!!!

$au80
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living in an armish paradise.....no gates here!

mawuahahaha :)

[Anonymoose]

Senshi, don't know if you noticed after your post but I included the URL of the shop in my post - Komplett.co.uk is the shop not my sig :D I've spent about £400 with them so far and not had any problems yet.

Other UK favourites are www.cclcomputers.biz, www.ebuyer.com and www.wstore.co.uk (occassionally, mainly for special offers)

The price is usually a pretty close run thing between Ebuyer, CCL and Komplett but it's handy having 3 sources if you're after a hard to find or in demand item...

[rado]

My HDD is 40GB. Used space only 7.76GB.

The new models HDD are 500GB for a single drive. Amazing!

senshi

[senshi]

Nope, not a joke

http://www.freecom.com/ecProduct_detail.asp?ID=544&nr=2068&prodn=FHD%2D2+40+GB+USB%2D2+%26+FIREWIRE

take a look

AND! a 60Gig is £190

Approx £3 to £3.50 a Gig, at current memory prices, thats not too bad a price.

[senshi]