how many times do you think you can re-install your hard drive with linux before it goes on bonkers... ?

I think most hard drives are suppose to handle thousands of formats and reinstalls in their lifetime... something like that.

Kind of an unfair poll. Even a harddisk from 20 years ago could handle more then 11 - 20 installs.

ook sorry... well i put it there coz my last hard drive took a nose dive after i installed windows, debian, mandrake, debian and then mandrake.

since my experience with hardware is kinda limited, i was wondering about this...

developed bad sectors in the boot sector, i think...

okok i think maybe you could multiply every number by 1000 and poll again...? moderator please? thks...

it has more to do with HD's getting older.
the more activity u have on a HD the older he gets
a hardrive that doesnt do much will live longer

I had a harddisk that took a fair beating. Had Win95 and Mandy 7.2, and a 3rd partition which was shared. Since it was only 6gb harddisk, it wasn't really enough, so I was constantly removing Mandy, doing some stuff (like ripping, ripping some more, and then a little more ripping, and a burn), then putting Mandy back in. The drive never failed on me. In fact, it's still going - I put into my sisters computer and it's ticking over with WinME. Your harddisk should be able to cope with most forms of abuse (format wise), and it's just the age that should really affect it.

About every 2.5 weeks we reformat and reload software in our classes. Some OS/2 and some Solaris. If you're talking about IDE drives over the past 4 to 5 years (the time I have been teaching) I have had a failure about 1 in 30. Again my students are basically abusing the drives. I have had less problems with SCSI drives. I'd say probably 1 in 50.
At home I have reloaded and reformatted different drives with various Linux distros and I have had maybe one real drive failure. Most drives are pretty durable. I don't think it would be kind to name brands here unless someone had real quantitative stats. Although I will say that I have had more trouble with Maxtor drives than any others.

While hard drive failure has everything to do with use/abuse, it has no specific connection to installing anything. All the hard drive knows is that there are read and write actions, it could care less what those actions actually represent .

You must be joking or just getting the lucky lemon one's..... those are the one's I never have problems with.

i've got a maxtor and a seagate... 15GB and 20GB...

the one that died on me was a maxtor... i guess i got the lucky lemon as well...

I've got a box circa 93 or 94.
Cyrix 486DLC
wd0= Quantum TRB850A 810MB
wd1= WDC AC2850F 814MB

all parts were bought from low bidder I'm sure.
I've used it as a crash box until RH and mandy started telling me... You don't have enough memory to install linux...RAM is maxed out at 16M.
Since then I've installed FBSD and OBSD many times til I decided to leave OBSD on. it runs 24/7 with a long term load average of 1.51. the disk light is almost always on, 10 second itervals, and the second disk (which sounds like a train wreck) makes a racket every 35-40 seconds or so...

Those are my oldest drives. four others include 2scsi's in a mac 7600. and 2 IDE's that are less than one year. Never had one die on me {knocking on wood}

With the tight tolerances used in manufacturing, the chances of getting a lemon are slim. If you have you you'll usually know within a week. Besides the fact that Maxtor drives have failed on me, in the past (4 to 5 years ago) we have also had documented problems with Maxtor compatability with other drives in a system. For example you couldn't put a Maxtor scsi in the same box with a Conner. (I am obviously dating myself) I also know that we buy IBM, Western digital, Seagate, and Quantums for our systems which include things like retail equipment(cash registers), ATMs, servers and PC's. The only time I see Maxtor is when we are dealing eith another company's equipment. One of the reasons could be just price. We get a better deal buying the other drives. I know that a couple of years ago IBM was putting Maxtor drives in their 300GL & 300PL PC's instead of using IBM drives. They couldn't be all bad then. The bottom line is that like cars, you can find a lemon in any bunch of any manufacturer's drives.

yes... lemonised drives... i think i'll stick to the other hard drives other than Maxtor in future...

Just adding my 2 cents.

I have had horrible luck with Western Digital and my buddy has an even worse history with Seagate.

I started using Maxtor about a year ago and I have had no problems with them yet.

I think the times you can reformat are just about limitless, I have never had an os loaded for more than 2 months probably, I just get bored and want to try something new, plus this drive gets some use, I use vmware and run up to 3 os's at the same time, plus I have a triple boot to add to that and I have a good ole quantum fireball, which in my experience does what the name says "fireball" of course I have had to low level format 2 times because of bad sectors but is has ran for about a year since the last low level format.