[PLUG] Hard Drives - WD Red Pro?

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 05:11:41PM -0800, Bill Barry wrote:
> I would comment that the angst about buying from local merchants is
> unnecessary. If you feel bad about buying from Amazon or Newegg or buying

In the past, buying locally meant buying from someone I
know, trust, and can talk to and get advice from.  If zero
information and zero trust is involved, Bill is spot on
about saving money and donating to a charity, such as:

http://www.helpisonthewaypuertorico.com/

The backblaze info is helpful, thanks Dan!

> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-stats-q2-2017/

... though they do not mention the specific drives I am
considering.  Given their business (hosting third party
backups), they probably don't want to return drives under
warranty, so warranty support probably doesn't matter.

My first "big" hard drive (for my first Unix machine) was
from Seagate: $2000 for a 600MB SCSI drive, about 20 years
ago.  Which also broke, out of warranty, so I fixed it
myself with a circuit kludge to replace a failed rotation 
sensor in the spindle drive motor.  Ah the good old days,
when real geeks programmed with solder...


The question about Amazon and Newegg and ??? is ... am
I missing a better source for online orders?  I've never
tried to return a drive to Amazon or Newegg, and I don't
know what warranty service is like from WD or Seagate.  I
have successfully returned badly-described consumer goods
to Amazon, which cost Jeff Bezos 2e-11 of his net worth.

It saddens me that Hitachi HGST got bought by Western
Digital.  Hitachi was good people, but they never really
recovered economically after the earthquake/tsunami. 
I licensed technology to Hitachi (ULSI semiconductor
division), and had friends there.  

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com