I also have some older 7200.9 and 7200.8 drives and they are all still going strong. In fact all of my larger IDE drives are now located in my main test/download server. I've moved my newer systems over to just SATA. So great getting rid of those horrible ribbon cables! The server has 6 IDE drives with a mix of 200 and 160 GB drives. Some are Seagate and others are Maxtor. And that system is running 24/7 constantly downloading and seeding, plus used for test dev work for web design.

I wonder how many of the current SATA drives will still be going as strong after so many years?

And as mentioned before, I also still have ny 2 old IBM Deskstar drives. A 60GB and a 120GB drive. The 60GB drive is really old now. Must be around 2000 I think. I remember when i originally bought it my current P2 400 PC only had a slow ATA33 IDE interface, and couldn't address drives larger than 32GB. I had to install a patch from IBM which fixed this and made the system see the whole disk. Although saying that, even in Windows 2000 you had to patch the system or install SP2 to use large HDDs over 133GB. I remember that when I installed a 200GB drive and wondered why it would only let me partition 133GB of it. Back to the IBMs. I also remember with the 60GB one having to flash its firmware more than once over the years to make it work correctly. When i first got it I had to to update the firmware to work with the patched Mobo/OS, and later when I moved the drive into a newer system it wasn't being recognised and had to be flashed again to make it show and work with the motherboard. I don't think I had any similar issues with the newer 120GB drive. That one was from 2002 when i built the next PC to replace the P2 400 one. And both drives still going strong, although neither is in the server, they are instead in another older PC used for Linux testing and DOS games.

I have just remembered a strange situation I had with a HDD a while back. At the time my main system was running an Athlon 64 Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard, which had 8 SATA ports. I installed a 300GB SATA Maxtor drive as the boot drive and began installing XP onto it. However every time it went to do the first reboot to then continue the install the system would completely lose the HDD on the reboot. It didn't show at post or in the bios. Very strange. After some searching I found that this motherboard had a conflict with Maxtor SATA drives. I've never encountered anything like that before. I replaced it with a 500GB Seagate SATA drive and that worked perfectly. The strange thing is, I then added the Maxtor 300GB drive to the system as a second drive and it worked fine like that. It just didn't like being the boot drive. Anyone else encountered similar?