Things you should never do to a customers' machine/disk: Part 10, bricking a drive

Ouch. We test our JackRabbit and Delta-V (ΔV) units extensively … long burn-in times, after any firmware updates. We like to run into the problems in-lab as compared to in-field. Some customers get annoyed at what they perceive to be slow shipping, but we want to know, when it leaves our lab, that this machine, and all its parts, works.

It appears that Seagate is having an issue with this last bit. Note: We have been huge fans of Seagate product. However I am starting to worry that the units we keep getting back from customers for warranty exchange, may not all be broken. Actually, they may be functional … but with a firmware issue. This is an issue for us as we have been using (effectively exclusively) Seagate drives. As of monday, our BOMs now have Western Digital options. We have used WD in the past, and while good drives, we have had a few more failures than we like. We haven’t used them in production boxes for a while. I think it is time.