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#21
For me SMART does have value but we must never rely on it. You always need backups regardless the age of the drive or the lack of SMART warnings. If a drive begins to show serious warnings it is probably time to replace it, before it actually fails. A sudden failure may occur at a very inconvenient time.
It seems to be totally random.
I prefer Western Digital to Seagate, as a result of the problems my housemate experienced.
He had 3 Seagate SATA HDDs fail within ~12 months (a few years ago).
Ironically, he bought me a Seagate 320 GB IDE HDD in 2007 and that one still works.
I haven't had any problems with Western Digital, apart from the "8 second" parking issue.
IMO, it is a stupid setting to have on a desktop HDD.
I disabled the timer on my older WD Green HDDs (WD10EAVS, WD15EARS, WD20EARX).
It seems that you can't disable it on the new model (WD20EZRX) so I had to settle for setting it to 5 minutes.
They usually do.
Last edited by lehnerus2000; 09 Feb 2014 at 20:18. Reason: Quote Added