[ale] HD Failures: bad luck or technical error??

[aaron]

The good news is I just updated my mian system from RH 7.1 to RH 7.2.
I like it. Actually, I like it a lot. The latest updates to Gnome have 
made it screamingly fast!! 

The BAD news is that my latest OS install is the 3rd one in about 18 
months and ALL of my updates have been motivated by physical hard drive 
failures. (If hardware failures require you to install and config a 
system, may as well install and configure the latest and greatest.)

My hardware is a decent roll your own box... a tower case with ample air 
space, 250w power supply, reputable Tyan mother board w/ dual IDE on 
board, PIII 600 CPU, generous amounts of memory and a quality Matrox 400 
AGP graphics card. All the distros I've esperimented with have recognized 
my hardware and RH always seems to install just fine. My practice when 
installing on a new drive is to use the Disk Druid tools to manually set 
up seperate /, /boot, /home, /tmp, /var, /usr and swap partitions, 
including a full format of all partitions with bad block checks.

About 4 months after my initial RH 6.1 install, I started getting some 
odd errors and program crashes, ending a couple weeks later with an 
unreadable hard drive. Maxtor replaced the 20 gig dirve under warranty 
with an identical unit and I used the HD swap as an excuse to update to 
RH 6.2. The 6.2 sytem was fine for another 5 months or so, then crash 
problems started cropping up again. I now had reason to suspect the hard 
drive, so I just went out and bought a 15 gig Western Digital at 
RadioShack.com and upgraded to RH 7.1 in the process. (I also got the 
dealer to exchange the Maxtor for a 15 gig Fuji and made that one a 
mirror / backup drive for paranoia's sake.)

Things had been going good for about 8 months, then a couple weeks ago my 
largest partition started coming up with "short read" errors which 
reqired manual fdisk passes to restore before the system would boot. 
Subsequently, the drive started making some loud, ominous clicking noises 
at boot time, and eventually the disk showed up as unbootable (thankfully 
AFTER I had time to run an up-to-date mirror to my "backup" drive).

So... I found a 40 gig Wester Digital 7200 for $90 at recent computer 
fair, have dropped it in and installed RH 7.2 from a commercial CD set I 
purchased. 

So I'm looking for opinions on what might be causing my problems.
Am I just having a run of bad luck with these drives?? Are these low 
priced IDE units just too cheap?? Could my MB IDE controller or some 
obscure BIOS setting error be initiating these failures?? Am I missing 
some special trick for formatting and partitioning?? Will the new ext3 
file system magically solve everything??

I'd like to get to a point where I do upgrade migrations on MY schedule, 
not the hard drive's!  Any helpful suggestions for doing that will be 
appreciated.

peace
(after justice)
aaron

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