http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/index.html

I'm stumped.

It looks like critical hardware damage causing diskdrive faliure... what do you see it as.

I see it as see-through drive platters... I didn't even know that was possible. Actually, up until now, I didn't know they were made out of plastic...

Seems to me its exactly as he says. The drive head was scraping against the platters, and literally scraped the magnetic surface right off.

Why was the HDD referred to as an "IBM Death Star", instead of an "IBM DeskStar"?

Anyway, that does look boggling. I think that perhaps, an over- heating problem may have caused the heads to become displaced, resulting in them "scrubbing" off the platters. Quite an amazing occurance. Has IBM been informaed of this?

They should sell it on eBay for lots of money and then buy a new one.

That is weird...what is with the blue stuff?

weird.
some drive platters are made of glass. the magnetic coating on them is where the info is stored.
i personally have coated some things just to have the coating wipe off when the process is done. this could be for a number of reasons.
bad process vacuum, contamination of source material, too much water in the residual background gasses for the process...

IBM's known for horrible hard drives (now owns Hitachi)

quite true. If you want a good drive, go with maxtor, from my experience.

Ha. No.

Had a total of three Maxtors, five WD. Maxtors have all been replaced by WD because they crapped out.

Friend of mine got a Maxtor drive for his computer. Within a week, it was dead.

Of course, everybody has had different experiences with our HDDs... My old computer ran with its Maxtor 15GB drive, and it's never had any problems in the 4 years I've owned it; none of the drive surface has ever even become corrupted!

Seagate > *. They have a 10 year warranty, can't really beat that.

Wolfy's right. Maxtor is pure ****, I've had several of them and they all crapped out after their short warranties.

Anyone who says maxtor is crap lies. Maxtor is amazing. WD and Maxtor both have made faulty drives though--everyone has. IBM just has HORRIBLE drives.

Personally, my Maxtor (40gb) has lasted just fine over the past year.

I've had 4 Maxtor hard drives. All of them without exception crapped out after the 90 day warranty. Oh wait, except 1, it pooped out just before. And then the replacement died in turn.

So, I think I can say they're ****box without lying.

My Maxtor is going strong after over 5 years now. My WD died in under 3 months. So yeah, I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there. I don't hold it against WD, but I have yet to have a failing Maxtor HD. This does extend to multiple computers and drives, so it's not just my single drive.

I've got two WD's in my personal computer, three in my other, my dad has two in his office computer, two in our family computer, my mom has one in her computer, and four of my friends have WDs (two each).

We've had to replace no WDs. At all.

I had my computer for 3 months before my Maxtor went out. Got it replaced for free and I had an image for back up so I only lost a couple school papers and all my saved games.

My 40gb Maxtor has been going strong for 2 years now. I've had WD's in the past (on my 286, 486 and Celeron 400) and they all crapped out on me (one 40mb, one 200mb and a 1.2 gb).

Fujitsu drives are great. They're noisy, but I've never had a problem with my 8gb. It's in my gf's computer right now, and has been in use for over 5 years.

I've never had any problems with either WD or Maxtor... but I've found the Maxtor drives to be a little more quiet than the WDs...

The only hard drive I've ever had a problem with was my Seagate I got with my eMachine computer a number of years back, which is the computer that got me into computers.

But I would randomly lose files, and I would install programs and the amount of space it took up on the drive was sometimes far more than it should have been... Like I'd install a game that took up 300 MB or something, but then I'd check my free space in My Computer and it'd be between 500 and 1 Gig off, uninstall the game, or software and it'd sometimes go back where it should, but sometimes it wouldn't, I'd install it again, and it'd be fine.

It fixed itself when I would defrag, but only temporarily, and also when I would re-install windows. Just before I got rid of the computer, it started to work a bit better though.

It was the strangest hard drive I've ever dealt with... but I don't hold it against Seagate or eMachines, I think I just got a bad drive, it still held what I needed it to at the time, and never lost anything I couldn't get back, so it wasn't too bad.

Seagate's have a 5 year warranty.

I have had no bad experiences with any hard drive company inparticular other than IBM.

When mass production in the millions yields a few defective products you happen to get, it doesn't make them bad. Half the people say WD sucks, and Maxtor rocks, the other half says the opposite...

I'm finally getting around to updating my computer. Currently, I have a pathetic 8GB HD (not sure what brand). I've had it a number of years, bought it used, it's never crapped out on me. Today, I won an 80GB WD HD on ebay, as well as a 256MB SDRAM card (bumping me up to 384MB).

I can't update my processor without buying a new motherboard. It's maxed.

(P.S. Buy my stuff (which doesn't relate to computers in any way). I need money.)