The only thing worse than software problems...

Are hardware problems.

I was very happy to finally get a new, up-to-date machine (2.4 GHz P4) machine at work last week, complete with a shiny new 40 Gb hard drive. I installed the newly-gold Windows Server 2003 and the slew of applications that I need to do my job and I was off to the races. Everything was going smoothly until I came in Monday morning and pressed a key to break the machine out of its screen-saver hibernation. Beep! Reboot. Fuck.

Half an hour of trying unsuccessfully to boot, I gave up. Shortly thereafter, I began hearing strange clicking noises coming from the drive. Ack. Another drive, another install of W2K3, and the better part of a of a day later, I'm back where I started, pretty much the same, save a large ball of cynicism I've yet to remove from my ass.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have had a drive fail on me, but all that have failed have been Western Digitals. Typically, at home, I would buy Fujitsu, but I'm told that they don't make desktop drives anymore, is that correct? Right now, at work, I have a Seagate, and at home, I have a WD (it was a present) and a Quantum.

What does the population at large recommend for hard drives? Has anyone else out there experienced the craptactular experience that is a hard drive failure? Did you have backups? ;) What drives have good warranties now? Which ones have the best MTBF (mean time between failures)?

I'm curious.

Originally posted on Tuesday, 2003-05-13 at 00:36:11.