I've had mine up for a year without a single disk error.
Be prepared to reformat your hard drive if you encounter disk errors or other unexpected problems, especially at the 83 MHz speed.
My mother called to tell me that their computer was throwing a bunch of disk errors in Windows.
A definite identification of a hardware error is usually easy - for example a disk error is rarely caused by software.
One tool said I had 'disk errors,' and the restore points in XP Pro of course would not work.
This device is usually used when testing the behaviour of a program when it encounters a "disk full" error.
Saving money on a drive that is used to back up precious data is nice until you lose everything because of a disk error.
I started doing this to minimize disk errors and reduce the chance of disk failure.
Speaking of disk errors, I had a funny little quick anecdote here.
Hard disk errors often plague the Windows 9x series.