On Wed, 25 Dec 2013 08:21:10 -0600, philo* wrote:

On 12/24/2013 11:40 PM, wrote:



Only once have I gotten on my bench a standard HD that went into
instant failure mode.

I lucked out and found an SMT cap. with a cracked solder joint and
repaired it.

The next day I gave the owner of the machine a very severe lecture on
making backups!
Of the last 5 HD failures I've had come in, 2 were "hard", one had
been slow for months, and the other one had occaisionally had access
problems, which, in hindsight, were a warning. Because it would
generally boot on the second reboot other problems were suspected -
not the drive. When it quit completely, the drive could not be
accessed even as a second drive. Not sure if a new drive would have
fixed it completely as we junked the computer.




There is very little around here that I junk.


If it's a P-4 or above it's well worth keeping.
I have boxes of spare parts and can get just about anything going again.
This was one of the limited number of "acer power" computers that had
problems with sound and compatability with certain printers. It had
been put into a low stress application for the last 6 years - and it's
time had come.

The decent rejects get raffled off to employees for home use.
Sometimes hard to get takers for 7 year old or older computers around
here (silicon valley north) (aka "the technology triangle")