** Paul Freeman <paul@???> [2013-10-15 01:15]:
> On 2013-10-15 00:11, Paul Tansom wrote:
> >True, but they aren't what they used to be, largely I suspect due
> >to the
> >tighter tolerances of the higher capacities. For example, I have a
> >120M drive
>
> I still have a mighty 40M Quantum drive which I used to use with my
> old A500 too I think it probably still works as well! ahh the days
> of 68k asm coding *sigh* :)
Mine was on a card inside my A1500. I went for the big box version on the basis
that keeping cards inside was tidier and should be cheaper than chaining boxes
via cables. Little did I realise that the sheer volume of add-ons for the A500
would keep the prices down, often lower than the internal cards!
Oddly, given that the Amiga was a top games machine, my main use for it was
DTP, word processing and databases! What I really wanted was an accelerator as
dragging things around in Pro Page was an exercise in the stamina of your mouse
finger and patience as the screen draw caught up!
> anyway I was going to counter slightly and say that I have
> experienced much better reliability of drives in recent years... I'd
> say things were not so good (for me at least) when the cutting edge
> was around 4-6Gb size.. when I had quite a few failures of Western
> digital units. in 1999 I bought a several mighty? Seagate Barracuda
> 29Gb drives and they lasted well beyond the warranty of the time..
> enough that I have pretty much stuck with Seagate Barracuda's since
> then both for home use and at work (hosting servers) and Seagate
> Cheetah/Savvio in more recent years.
>
> I have also had pretty good experience with Hitachi Deskstar drives too
Strangely I've not tired Hitachi - strangely because they took over the old IBM
HD business which is where I used to work, and hence had a good deal of trust
in (after you've seen what I've put those drives through to qualify them you
gain a certain amount of confidence!).
<snip>
> backup backup backup - frequently :) and if downtime/backup
> restoration is an issue for you perhaps raid5
Absolutely. Server wise I tend to stick to software RAID mirrors. For the level
of server I work with the convenience of being able to mount one of the drives
independently of the other and copy the data off without specialist software or
recovery services is a great bonus.
> speaking of old Amiga days my old coding/hacking cohort Jools/BuZz
> of xbmc4xbox, jogglerwiki fame has a raid5 (mdraid) array about 5
> years in age using Samsung Spinpoint drives... it gets quite heavy
> usage and is still badblock/re-alloc sector free across all drives!
> >in my old Amiga that still works (well did last time I used it,
> >but that was
> >only a couple of years ago), as well as an 80M drive in my old 386
> >laptop that
> >still boots, and a few 250M to 500M drives I still have in a box
> >of drives to
> >scrap that survived a DBan earlier this year. All these have had
> >solid daily
> >use over their primary phase of ownership (even if they have been
> >retired or
> >stored for now). At the same time I've had several 500G drives die
> >after just
> >over a year.
>
> I'm always interest to know what those drives were?
The Amiga was a Quantum SCSI drive, the one in my laptop an IBM 2.5" drive (and
thinking about it it is probably a large capacity, maybe 250M, as I upgraded it
and the diagnostic diskette that I had with it was never happy about that, but
it worked OK). The low capacity drives are mainly IBM, some of which are ex
test pieces that have been through hell and back (I caught them when scrapped
and ran solid diags and then backed up regularly - that's how I built my first
PC back in 1991 with 8G of hard disk space spread across 4 2G full height 3.5"
SCSI hard drive; cheaper to buy a SCSI card and use those than the disks). I
have slightly larger (1G to 8G) drives from Samsung and Seagate still going
strong - and given the number of Maxtor 80G to 160G drives I worked with I
still have a few of those that actually work.
I suspect you were more interested in the recent failures though, and from
memory they were a mix of WD, Samsung and Seagate.
** end quote [Paul Freeman]
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