(Well, not quite...)
I've since fixed my Barracuda so nothing's really wrong on a major scale anymore, but I thought this would make an interesting read. This was in response to a thread about 60GXP's failing on another thread. I meant to give my account, but ended up writing a short little story. Enjoy!
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I had one of my two 40GB 60GXP's die on me over a year ago. Another one quit last Christmas but is still working after being frozen. It's sitting outside my machine just acting as an occasional Linnux drive when I get bored. That marks over two years of its existance.
As for the replacement 60GXP on the first one--I eBay'd that sucker as soon as I got it and went on. I was using a 20GB Quantum Fireball lct10 for a boot drive prior to that 40GXP... it died probably 3-6 months before it did, threatening to take all of my data from the past couple years with it. That's bad when you're a programmer and a student.
I then decided to try a 40GB Seagate Barracuda IV for a boot drive, but that went paws up yesterday. Total life: an impressive 8 months. It was kind enough to die on the day before my birthday (today). "Happy birthday, Geoff--your computer's dead."
Talk about a bum deal. To top it off, my 5xWD1200JB array on a 3ware Escalade 7500-8 controller gets an impressive 24MB/s write and 50MB/s read. Yet another birthday gift gone horribly wrong. I was going to flash my hard drives but lo and behold my floppy drive doesn't work in Windows. Okay, I think to myself, and write the boot disk with my laptop. Of course, now my floppy drive won't recognize there's a disk in there during boot-up (some times) and the times it will, it says "Unexpected I/O Error" with the boot disk or "Non-system disk" with any other.
Of course, when I wrote a 2nd boot disk, it just doesn't acknowledge that it's there and tries to continue booting either going to the nVidia DHCP dummy terminal or half-loading Windows.
Happy birthday to me.