IDE and EIDE hard drives have been manufactured with ever increasing storage space over the past years. As the storage space for these drives increased the prices began to greatly decrease. Hard drive manufacturers in turn began to look for ways to reduce the production costs of these mass storage mediums.

It is often the case that the materials used for coating the surface of the disks and the material used in the head sets (read/write sets) are subject to this cost-cutting. Inexpensive hard drives have shown to be the most susceptible to "head crashs". The reason for this is found in the materials used in these inexpensive drives. In order to bring the continuous fall of prices under control, some manufacturers use very inexpensive materials. In this case the heads and the disk surface coating of the hard drive suffers. These drives often develop "head crashs".

But one should not derive from this that all inexpensive hard drives are bad quality. Hard drives often are sold inexpensively because e.g. a newer model has come on the market or the capacity doesn't correspond to market demands anymore.

Important to remember is that IDE hard drives should not be used in servers holding critical company data. Long term tests conducted in our labs have shown that IDE hard drives have up to a 10 times higher crash rate than SCSI hard drives.