I've noticed a proliferation of catalog vendors selling extremely large hard drives, in the 50+ GB range. However, I have heard that many drives of this size have been recalled due to unreliability.

I am in need of some major disk space for our server, but don't want to buy a high-risk venture. I need a stable device, so I'll settle for a smaller drive if I know it will work.

Can anyone confirm or deny these rumors?
(If so, please tell me about the drive and your experience with it.)

Thanks.

I am read usenet news every day and also a lot of the hardware review sites and also storagereview.com, and I can say that I have never heard of large hard drives being inherently unreliable. I have a G4/400 and a Maxtor 61GB living happily together in blissful harmony. If you want my advice, get this drive if it is for your personal home use because it is an Ultra66 5400 RPM drive. I believe there are Cheeta SCSI drives that are 10,000 and even 15,000 RPM that are 75GB+, but they are nearly $1700 whereas mine was under $300.

You say this is going in a server?
I'm assuming you are running SCSI in the server. My experience with ATA (IDE, whatever) has been less than rewarding there. I haven't heard if reliability problems with the larger drives, but I'd look long and hard at something I was going to put into a server. You seem to be doing that. The $1,700 - 10,000 rpm drive might be intended for servers and be heavy-duty.
What works great in an iMac or a G4 for workstation use may blow up when 10 people hit it at the same time on your network.
Having just replaced a couple of hard drives that went bad in a server, I know. The money you save may be what they use for your severance pay or to hire your replacement when the drive fails on a deadline and you have to tell them it'll be tomorrow before you can get another one, the one you should have gotten in the first place. I work at a daily newspaper, where there is no margin for error. The drives have to work every day. No exeptions. If they don't, we don't have a newspaper.
Don't skimp on server hard drives. You will be sorry. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But Some day you will be sorry.
Also remember when you increase server space, you have to have some way to back that thing up. Mirror is good, tape backup you can take off site is better.
Hope this helps. Hope this doesn't seem to assume you don't know anything, but we all were new at this at one time or another. You may know these things, but the next guy may not. Maybe it will help him.

[This message has been edited by Don Foy (edited 07-14-2000).]

Extremely Large Hard Drives......Hmmmmm! - Four of my favourite words!

Thanks for your input, everyone.
To give you a little more information, Don, not only is it going in a server, but an OS X Server (B/W G3/450). It has a SCSI Ultra2 LVD PCI card, and two 9GB drives. But I want more than a mere 18 GB. So I think I'll be buying larger versions (36GB) of the Seagate Cheetahs that came in the pre-config Apple box.

Next fiscal year's budget should allow me to buy a hardware RAID.