The "myth" of PSX longevity?

Interesting, does that mean it would be possibly to fix a faulty Maxtor drive of a PSX DESR... or is their Sony specific firmware preventing such measures?
Apart from physical damage, I wonder what flaws the drives in faulty PSX units are suffering - if any (except aging wear).

 

We had lots of them - and these were drives that were sitting in a nice clean air-conditioned room with a very limited number of spindle power cycles. In fact, we went to some lengths to avoid spinning down the Maxtors because it seemed that every time you did some of them wouldn't start up again. I've talked to a number of other people who had similar experiences during the same time period, too.

 

The firmware failures are caused by sectors failing. There will be NO actual fix for physical damage, ever.
Even if you write a new firmware into the disk and it remaps the bad sectors, nothing will change the fact that the disk is dying.

My first SCPH-20400 had a Maxtor disk in it. It was originally half brain-dead, as SMART could not be enabled. One day, a few tens of thousands of bad sectors opened up overnight.

 

Maxtor drives were the worst (let's forget about antique Conner and Kalok drives). I still remember catastrophic failure when 2000+ drives failed in one day. Also i have only one surviving 40Gb Maxtor drive and there's 50 Samsung SP0802N and 40 WD1600 in a cabinet behind me. All have ideal SMART after 10 years 24/7. We had 4000+ of those and only 10 failed, 8 were burned by failed PSU.