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To: Paul Engel who wrote (49849)	3/6/1998 8:48:00 AM
From: Barry A. Watzman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

I am using mostly Maxtor because they seem, at the moment, to have the best price/performance. I have also used Western Digital in the past, they make a good drive, but they fell behind the technology by delaying movement to MR (magneto restrictive) heads. While they have now made the move, they haven't caught up to Maxtor in terms of price vs. capacity. I can't believe how low drive prices have fallen, I'm seeing retail boxed Maxtor 5.2 gig ultra DMA drives at $199 (after $30 rebate). An 11 gig Ultra DMA drive is due from Maxtor shortly. It was predicted last year that we would have 20 gig drives by the 3rd quarter, looks like it could happen.

To: Paul Engel who wrote (49849)	3/6/1998 10:47:00 AM
From: L. Adam Latham	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Paul: Slightly off-opic Re: Hard drive reliability The site I support utilizes Intel Paragon supercomputers, with each one housing 50 Seagate 4 GByte SCSI disks (in 10 level-3 RAIDs with 5 disk per RAID). These disks are POUNDED 24 hours a day solving very large systems of linear equations. I would estimate that they are receiving 1000x more reads/writes than an average desktop disk (maybe less for a server). They are quite reliable, though they do occasionally fail. Sometimes they can be reconstructed using the RAID-3's parity and put back in service, other times they are completely dead. Don't know much about price, however. Personally, if I had an NT system with important data, I'd opt for RAID level 1 (mirroring) using disk duplexing, especially with the decline in disk prices. Adam