Summary: Yes, Windows sucks. Yes, Windows hardware sucks.
Another data point - I recently discovered that my Win95 drives were
dying [I lost data]. They are same make and model, but different
production dates. Both drives are over 1 year old, EIDE, have
been quite noisy since day one, and each have roughly 128 bad blocks
now [I wonder how many were recovered by sparing] all located in the
outer tracks.
I also have two SCSI drives in my system. They are the same make
and model (one is wide, one is narrow). One is about 1 year older
than the other, and both are about 1 year older than the faulty EIDE
drives. Both have been completely silent since day one [the oldest
is getting noisy on spin-up, but is silent the rest of the time].
The two SCSI drives have also NEVER had a bad block that resulted
in data loss [I've not checked the sparing tables lately, so I
can't say if they've recovered from any errors].
The SCSI drives are much faster than the EIDE ones too.
I can't see _ever_ buying EIDE drives again. I bought a _cheap_
SCSI drive the other day - not only is it the smallest and hottest
running drive I've ever seen [though completely silent], but it runs
rings around an EQUALLY priced EIDE drive.
-- Andrew E. Mileski mailto:aem@netcom.ca