While I was waiting for a compile/unit test to finish, I noticed that one of the failed hard disks (a Maxtor MaxLine Plus II 250Gb ATA/133 HDD) I was using as a paperweight had two stickers on it. Having nothing better to do, I pulled the top one off, just to see what the changes were.
I wasn’t particularly impressed with what I found.
On the bottom sticker: manufacture date 17JAN2004. On the top sticker: manufacture date 18FEB2004
On the bottom sticker: LBA = 488281250. On the top sticker: LBA = 490234752
So, in the month that this particular drive was sat in the Maxtor factory, it managed to grow by almost a gigabyte! All for the cost of another sticker!
And the reason why I failed this disk? It had a load of bad sectors. (Is that ironic, Alanis?)