I used to work at a large community college where I supported several hundred Gateway 2000 machines, both in labs and as instructor workstations. They all used WD drives. I replaced a hard drive about once every 2-3 weeks (not to mention the other crap hardware Gateway uses). What year was that? I am curious because of my own experience with WD a few years ago. At the beginning of 1998 my wife and I went to Peru while we left our house in care of a friend. While there, my friend called my wife's family to say that the cat was fine and my computer was dead. by the time it got mangled into spanish and back to english, it came out
Danny Sauer wrote: that my cat crashed the computer. When I got back I found that the WD drive had died and only made loud clunking sounds. It was still under warranty so I sent it for replacement. It was 2 months before I got the replacement. WD gave me the stall and even at one point sent a letter saying they had just switched to a new computer accounting system so they were behind in shipments. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was a serious quality control problem that made them have to ship out a lot of warranty replacements. The identical drive belonging to the friend who had watched my house also failed a few weeks later. I was a little nervous about buying a WD 120 GB drive last fall but the price was right so I took a chance. So far the pair of WDs are still working in the SuSE raid 1 setup. Damon Register