Adding memory to Sky+
 

Joe wrote:
"Pyriform" wrote in message
...
Jomtien wrote:
tony sayer wrote:

You wouldn't want a Maxtor, changed no end of those bl**dy things
for Seagate's which give no bother:)

I'll second that.

I've seen more dead Maxtors than any other brand. In fact of all the
times I have been called out to change a dead drive (dozens of
times),
I can't remember an occasion when it wasn't a Maxtor.

How do you know this isn't simply because they are the most commonly
fitted brand amongst your customer base?
FWIW As with printers 99% of printers are fitted with Canon parts.
The same for hard drives, all the platters and mechinisems are
manufactured by one manufacture. Hey think about all the one brands
in the super markets, you really think there are loads of factoreys
making cornflakes. Get real guys. Joe

What nonsense!

Adding memory to Sky+
 

In article , Pyriform
writes
tony sayer wrote:
Pyriform wrote:
tony sayer wrote:
You wouldn't want a Maxtor, changed no end of those bl**dy things
for Seagate's which give no bother:)

Same company, of course... Not had any problem with any of my
Maxtors. Was it a specific model you had trouble with? What were the
nature of the failures?

The 40 and 80 GB drives mainly bad sectors and complete disk failure.
Perhaps they had a bad batch, perhaps I was unlucky having bought a
lot of them for a number of PC's we maintain, but never ever had a
Seagate fail!...

That's the trouble with hard drives. Most of us base our opinions on our own
limited experience, and a few bad ones can colour our views for ever...
Seagate acquired Maxtor a year or so ago, and before that Maxtor acquired
Quantum. So the whole hard drive industry is rather inbred, and I have my
doubts that there are significant differences in reliability between brands,
except where there is a major design flaw in a particular model, as happens
from time to time.


Had another one today a 120 went down pox!..

Personally, I've yet to have a Maxtor fail, whereas the last hard drive I
replaced because it was faulty was a Seagate, oddly enough! Of course, the
fact that I've just rebuilt a PC for someone using a Maxtor drive makes me
want them to be reliable! The curious thing is, I initially installed a
Samsung drive, only to have it die completely during the install (click,
click, click). I got an identical replacement and tested it using Samsung's
software, and that yielded countless DRQ timeouts on two different
motherboards using two different SATA cables. I returned it and swapped it
for a Maxtor, which passed all the tests without error!

There is a postscript to this sorry tale. I got a phone call to say that the
PC wouldn't boot ("Insert proper boot media"). I decided to bring it home to
look at it more closely. Of course, it booted perfectly. I used the PC at
various times over the next few days, stress testing it thoroughly each
time, and eventually the problem recurred. I determined that the cause was
the SATA cable.

Yes the computer equivalent of the TV SCART eh;?..

Thermal stress and vibrations from the hard drive were
causing it to slowly back out of the socket. This never manifested as data
loss in a running system (though it might have done so eventually), but
always as failure of the BIOS to detect the drive when the PC was rebooted
after cooling down. Replacing it with a latching SATA connector seems to
have solved the problem.

I'm now wondering if the dodgy SATA cable somehow killed the Samsung drives,
though this does seem implausible... But two faulty drives in succession
seems equally implausible!



Agree with that...




--
Tony Sayer

Adding memory to Sky+
 

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:22:13 +0000, Mike Henry
wrote:

In .com, "Ed"
wrote:

I have a V3 pace box with a 160 drive of which half is locked. WTF?
Why?

It's reserved by Sky for future push-TV applications. They control the
disc space, not you.

In 2002 one of TiVo's partners in the UK, the BBC, experimented once
with a similar function. The UK TiVo has reserved a very modest(1GB
approx) of a 40GB drive, and an episode of "Dossa and Joe" was
auto-scheduled - but ONLY if your tivo wasn't set to record anything
else. And since that 1GB had been reserved space since the day the
machine was first turned on, no-one's recordings were "deleted to make
room" for it.

How could users tell that this had happened and wasn't just an
off-the-wall suggestion, as happens sometimes (e.g. my TiVo recently
went through a phase of recording WW2 documentaries off the History
Channel, despite my never recording or thumbing-up anything remotely
along those lines myself)? Did it have a different icon or position in
Now Playing or something?

Jerry Brown
--
A cat may look at a king
(but probably won't bother)

http://www.jwbrown.co.uk

Adding memory to Sky+
 

On 12 Jan 2007 00:28:57 GMT, Mr Guest
wrote:

Have had three failed Maxtor drives replaced under warranty in the
last four years, out of five purchased.

I've had something like 10 drives replaced. Often the replacements
fail too!

Actually the failure is often more subtle - the drives will seem
perfectly OK, but a quick scan with Maxtor's own disc check tools will
see a disaster coming before you do. Happily the error code it gives
you is all you need to perform an RMA on Maxtor's website. The RMA
process is excellent.. then again, it needs to be.

Well, to be fair, this was a few years ago. I don't know if it's got
better under Seagate's watch.

--

Adding memory to Sky+
 

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:22:13 +0000, Mike Henry
wrote:

In 2002 one of TiVo's partners in the UK, the BBC, experimented once
with a similar function. The UK TiVo has reserved a very modest(1GB
approx) of a 40GB drive, and an episode of "Dossa and Joe" was
auto-scheduled

And not only was the start/end missing, but it wasn't even the first
episode. Muppets.

Fast-forward 5 years and Sky are about to do the same. But as you say,
Sky are reserving half of the disc! I can only wait to see how much of a
stink there will be when they use this functionality.

I think the difference is that the Sky service is likely to be just
that - an extra service that you don't have to use if you don't want
to.
--

Adding memory to Sky+
 

Paul D.Smith wrote (apparently) in uk.tech.digital-tv on Fri 12 Jan
2007 10:43:49:

...snip...

Do you lads all reboot your machines often? I have a number of
old machines with equally old disks by various manufacturers none
of which have ever failed (fingers well crossed here!).
Similarly, my employers (software company - 100s of PCs) rarely
see disk failures on desktops. The key point is that we NEVER
turn the PCs off or let the disks spin down.

[Snipped...]

This is on a couple of PCs that have been on all the time and only
have the disks spin down when there's been a power cut and the UPS
battery has given up (probably three or four times). I have now ended
up with more capacity on external hard drives than in all the PCs
here, just need to remember to back everything up regularly...
--
MrGuest
Always, seemingly, on the road to nowhere

Adding memory to Sky+
 

Pyriform wrote:

I've seen more dead Maxtors than any other brand. In fact of all the
times I have been called out to change a dead drive (dozens of times),
I can't remember an occasion when it wasn't a Maxtor.

How do you know this isn't simply because they are the most commonly fitted
brand amongst your customer base?

Because they aren't!

Believe it or not I do actually check the drive brand when setting a
new machine up. Maxtor are not ubiquitous and probably only account
for 25% of the working drives that I see.

--
Digibox problem? : A reboot solves 90% of these.
The Sky Digital FAQ: http://tinyurl.com/8vef5
UK TV overseas: http://tinyurl.com/6p73
BBC/ITV reception trouble? ; http://www.astra2d.com/
----
Only the truth as I see it.
No monies return'd. ;-)

Adding memory to Sky+
 

Believe it or not I do actually check the drive brand when setting a
new machine up. Maxtor are not ubiquitous and probably only account
for 25% of the working drives that I see.

Maxtors, at the moment, seem to be failing more than other brands. But to be
fair I have had mdoels from all makers fail at one time or another, a few
years back IBMS 'deathstars' were all the rage. These things go in cycles.
Who knows, in a few months, it might be Seagates.

Dave

Adding memory to Sky+
 

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:11:37 +0000, Mike Henry
wrote:

In , Jerry Brown
wrote:
On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:22:13 +0000, Mike Henry
wrote:

In 2002 one of TiVo's partners in the UK, the BBC, experimented once
with a similar function. The UK TiVo has reserved a very modest(1GB
approx) of a 40GB drive, and an episode of "Dossa and Joe" was
auto-scheduled - but ONLY if your tivo wasn't set to record anything
else. And since that 1GB had been reserved space since the day the
machine was first turned on, no-one's recordings were "deleted to make
room" for it.

How could users tell that this had happened and wasn't just an
off-the-wall suggestion, as happens sometimes (e.g. my TiVo recently
went through a phase of recording WW2 documentaries off the History
Channel, despite my never recording or thumbing-up anything remotely
along those lines myself)? Did it have a different icon or position in
Now Playing or something?

Yes, it appeared on the main "TiVo Central" menu, with a green
clapperboard icon.

Similar to the first image on this page for ("Go behind the scenes of
Seabiscuit"):
http://www.pvrcompare.com/dtimages.html
(they use a yellow star these days in the USA for a similar function)

HTH

Thanks Mike. That's cleared up something I've wondered about for years
(I didn't have a TiVo at the time of the incident)..

Jerry Brown
--
A cat may look at a king
(but probably won't bother)

http://www.jwbrown.co.uk

Adding memory to Sky+
 

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 20:55:31 +0000, Mike Henry
wrote:

The difference is that Sky's service locks off a whopping half of the
disc space.

Disc space that was never 'yours' to start with, so no different to
TiVo.


--