<story><title>ST3000DM001</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>myrandomcomment</author><text>Back in the mid 90s I was working in IT at a midsized company. We used Compaq desktops (this is the Pentium Pro timeframe). The HD in the system where quantum fireball (IIRC). They failed at an amazing rate all in the first 3 months (30%). We called Compaq at one point and said, look we want replacement drives for all of our remaining systems. After much back and forth (stupid on their part as we had 1000+ machines over their complete line, including servers, so good customer) they refused to help saying “we will only replace them as they fail.” Fine, as you wish. A week later we called into support and reported the failure of 50 HD. They did not believe us. Sent 3 technicians. After they tested the 20th HD the look on their face was priceless. At some point one of the techs noticed the taser on the one of the other work benches in IT. An hour later we received a call from the sale rep telling us that they would replace all the current drives in every system with this model as long as there are no more “mass failures.”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notacoward</author><text>Had a similar experience at a previous job. I&amp;#x27;d debugged a problem with one system down to a flaky drive, which I extracted and took to our sysadmin. Without hesitation, he &lt;i&gt;slammed&lt;/i&gt; it down on the floor.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It&amp;#x27;s not flaky now.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, I knew a lot more than he did about how hard drives work, but he knew a lot more about how &lt;i&gt;vendors&lt;/i&gt; work. A flaky drive might be hard to replace. A dead one wouldn&amp;#x27;t. Lesson learned.</text></comment>
<story><title>ST3000DM001</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>myrandomcomment</author><text>Back in the mid 90s I was working in IT at a midsized company. We used Compaq desktops (this is the Pentium Pro timeframe). The HD in the system where quantum fireball (IIRC). They failed at an amazing rate all in the first 3 months (30%). We called Compaq at one point and said, look we want replacement drives for all of our remaining systems. After much back and forth (stupid on their part as we had 1000+ machines over their complete line, including servers, so good customer) they refused to help saying “we will only replace them as they fail.” Fine, as you wish. A week later we called into support and reported the failure of 50 HD. They did not believe us. Sent 3 technicians. After they tested the 20th HD the look on their face was priceless. At some point one of the techs noticed the taser on the one of the other work benches in IT. An hour later we received a call from the sale rep telling us that they would replace all the current drives in every system with this model as long as there are no more “mass failures.”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>htek</author><text>I recall a similar experience with a particularly poor-performing $10k+ 3D graphics card for CAD&amp;#x2F;CAM back in the 90s. It had gone back and forth multiple times for crashing the system, locking up and just plain chugging along relative to the other cards we purchased. The problem was definitely the card, but the vendor claimed there was nothing wrong. Every time it was sent back to us there were more wire traces added to the card and other rework done with no explanation.&lt;p&gt;After running a pair of probes hooked up to 110vac along the fingers of the VESA bus connection on the video card (and a few microprocessor chips exploded), the scorch marks were cleaned up and it was sent back one more time. We finally did get a new card that worked perfectly along with a long, vaguely threatening letter.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the clearest path is through the mud.</text></comment>