This may not be the best place for it, but "discussion about the state of storage technologies, reliability, and what you can do to protect your data" has been initiated.
Screw SATA. How about we return to reliability?
That's called "SAS disks in an array" and it costs a
LOT of money. Like, so much. HP sells 300GB SAS disks for $330, and newegg has a 500gb seagate SAS/6g disk listed for $124 but I suspect that that's near-line sas, or sata with a sas connector. Even if you trust that Seagate disk to be what it is, right next to a 146gb Lenovo SAS disk for a few bucks more, that's still a quarter the space of the 2TB sata disks I'm about to mention, for more money. (Not so much more in this case that you would purchase two SATA disks for the price of one SAS disk, but you could pretty easily buy three of the SATA disks for the cost of three of those SAS disks and have like four times the storage available in your three-disk RAID 5 setup.)
Reasonably performing 2TB sata disks cost $120 each and every single modern PC can take two of them and mirror them and a utility like Acronis Drive Monitor can tell me when to replace one or both. (ADM is free and runs on Windows XP or newer. If you have a Windows PC and aren't already monitoring disk health, please download it.)
For this amount of money you might get a single SAS disk. (like that 300GB HP sas disk, I am pretty sure that the Seagate one is not actually SAS)
... That and solid state drives. SSDs had a bad rep for awhile but since like 2008, the newest SSDs around (even the budget ones) are capable of pretty much running 24/7, rewriting the whole drive constantly (or at least ten times per day) for like fifty or so years before they'd actually die.
Realistically, SATA and new sata-compatible drives are probably going to be around for quite awhile, and I can get huge, massive amounts of storage for relatively low prices. In light of this, it does not really bother me that much that a few of my disks will die each year, especially given that all of my data lives on modern systems that either have OSs with backup tools built in (Leopard+, Vista+) or have some of the inexpensive backup tools available. (I prefer Acronis TrueImage on my Windows systems, works great for XP and newer, and the boot CD works well for any Windows machine that can boot from CDs.)
The question that I see it as is "for any given unit of storage, would you rather pay huge sums up front for something "quality" that
might last a long time, or would you rather pay so little that you can justify getting two or three to run in a raid1 or raid5 fashion or so you can justify buying and using some other backup media?
One final note about disks and "quality" and "longevity" is that hard disks have always been inordinately delicate, annoying little devices, and always the technology we use to build them is getting better. It may seem like an unreasonable proposition to buy a 1tb or 2tb disk, but it's so inexpensive right now. When I had my first "new" computer, an Athlon 700 back in the year 2000, it would have been quite a lot of money to get a second disk in there, so I more or less just blindly trusted that the machine wouldn't go bottom-up, or that if I had any data that was important, ht would fit on zip100 or floppy diskettes, and that my [relatively] early CD-R disks wouldn't die.
These days, I, a university student with a fairly modest job, can afford not only to keep all of my digital life handy, and more or less never have to delete anything, but I can afford to back it up on other spinning hard disks or onto little pieces of solid state flash media, or onto the newest/fanciest optical media.
And this capability can be fairly reasonably added to any Mac or PC with USB and/or PCI slots that also happens to run a fairly modern OS. (So I'd say 2002 or later, but that's mainly for the bluray bit.)
If your data is important, there's no very good reason not to be treating it like it is.
... All of that having been said, hopefully the new disk for that iMac works well.
Also just a quick note about iMacs: The G3 iMacs pretty much can't have been productive during their productive lifecycles and still in good condition, just due to pretty poor cooling systems. Most computer parts can withstand heat, but iMacs, as per my understanding, produced so much heat and had no real way to get rid of it, that these days any survivors are just a mess inside. It's a shame too because they can be seen as the revival of the AIO form factor and maybe more importantly, the revival of Apple. I wouldn't even mind having one around but you'd need to spec out one pretty well to make it useful enough just to run the Microsoft RDP client, which is [unfortunately?] the only way I'd probably want to run one -- as an access device for a Windows 7 VM on my server. (Although that would be a badass way to use one, or a lab of them, especially if you already had the lab and were like "let's get some Windows 7 up on in here!" -- just put RDP file shortcuts on the desktops. Although it would be so much more energy efficient to use some kind of modern thin client and an LCD display.)
