Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Tuesday 21 May 2002 11:43 pm, you wrote: Ashley I'm sorry, I must have missed part of this message. What were you trying to say Ashley? Thanks! :-) -- /\ DarkLord \/ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Tuesday 21 May 2002 11:49 pm, you wrote: I must have hit Ctrl+X instead of Ctrl+C. ;) Ashley Ah, so that was it! Will do pronto... :-) -- /\ DarkLord \/ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Ashley Reynolds wrote: On Sun, 19 May 2002, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: I've been looking at the hard drive scene over the last few months in preparation for purchasing a new system. I've got most of the hardware details sorted out, but there is one area that I'm not quite settled on: hard drives. I am basically looking for an affordable 80GB IDE drive that can deliver fast and reliable (i.e. able to run 24x7) performance. I want to buy two of them so I can make a RAID0 out of them. Of course, they need to play well with Linux, and with any other 'alternate' OS/kernel I throw at it. From what I have read, that rules out Western Digital. Since I prize reliability, that would rule out IBM (IBM is offloading their hard drive business to Hitachi, so that's another minus for them). So the way I see it, only Seagate and Maxtor are still in the race. I checked out storagereview.com and the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (AKA 'Viper') 80GB appears to be neck-and-neck with the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80GB. Any thoughts, people? Thx. Hi Sridhar, I'm surprised that no-one has recommended Seagate drives yet! They are what I use in _all_ of my machines, and all of my customer's machines. I have never had any problems with them, at all. Aside from that fact, they're dirt cheap at the moment. Well, in Australia at least. Ashley -- Ashley Reynolds [EMAIL PROTECTED] Interesting Interesting indeed. I haven't bought a Seagate since lost interrupts and install freezes with them back about 6.1 and 7.0 time. At the time, they were totally useless for any VIA chipset board with kernel 2.2. (ST38421A and a 10G Baracuda) Experiences like that are what dictates lasting impressions, however erroneous they may be. With IBM in the toilet at present, and Quantum gone, I am looking for something I can use besides Maxtor, because I hate to place reliance on a single brand. WD is still totally out of the running and will continue to be until they learn to build quality in insttead of spend their money on customer relations for broken drives. (But if I wanted to teach employees how to take care of customers, I would arrange a Temporary duty at WD.-) Civileme Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
I've generally had good luck with Fujitsu's but did run into an interesting problem with a 6 gig version of it. We bought a lot of 100 of the drives with a previous company I was with. In the production line the drives had installed on them a whopping 75 megs of FreeBSD and our software. Normally a drive to drive clone took on the order of 30 minutes (multiple drives on the receive end would slow it down somewhat) What we did run into was 2 cases of drives (12 to a case) that were the slowest clones I'd ever seen 16 hours to write 75 megs (limited production test in our shop run once a problem had been found on the line.) and format the drives. Once they were finished they ran just fine. As long as you never had to write to them again. A 100k copy from cd to HDD could take 25 to 30 minutes. Fujitsu sent out a rep to look at the problem we had and left us two cases of 10 gig drives for our trouble. (The gesture was appreciated but 6 gigs was already overkill.) Never did find out why but it seemed to be a bad lot. James On Mon, 20 May 2002 22:57:23 -0400 darklord [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Monday 20 May 2002 09:56 pm, you wrote: The other day I opened up a store bought system, and was bowled over to see an oem fujitsu drive inside. Very interesting. I don't like assembly line systems; the custom approach is much better. But this looked like at least one thing they did right inside that box. I also ran into a couple of fujitsu 2.5 form factor drives in a proprietary kiosk a while back, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well they integrated into a desktop machine; no wierdisms with slave/master stuff like with some other laptop drives I've seen. But I've never seen the inside of a Tivo...would be interesting to hear about that! LX Can't comment about the Tivo (although I think they look interesting!) but my old 1992 Atari Falcon 030 computer used to use a Fujitsu (80 megs! Wow!) 2.5 inch IDE drive...never had a problem out of it... Still rather use it than use a Win-box grin -- /\ DarkLord \/ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 23:10, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: Fujitsu has sold its desktop HDD business to WD. I'm not sure about Hitachi for desktop drives yet (although they're great in the enterprise arena) -- I would like to wait and see how this 'joint venture' with IBM pans out. This might lead some to glean that Fujitsu hard drives cannot be had; it probably needs to be said that this is not the case. Only a portion of Fujitsu's manufacturing assets were sold. URL here: http://pr.fujitsu.com/en/news/2001/12/21.html Fujitsu is still in the hard drive business per se; their drives can still be had thru the big distribution channels, like 3d Micro or Tech Data. If you happen to be a reseller, you can contact the distro channels to purchase one, or if you are an end user you can contact a reseller, like newegg: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?submit=manufactorycatalog=15manufactory=1540DEPA=1 LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Lyvim Xaphir wrote:
On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 20:53, civileme wrote:
Looks like you lobbed a grenade into this thread, Civ. ;)
Make that two grenades; I forgot about the other post lol.
I've got a question at the end.
Actually, we are talking about data rates very differently
From/To the attached electronics and disk, the data is _pure serial_
Under any one head there iare
258048 bits of usable data in a rotation... And this rotation occurs
in 1/7200th of a second or about .139 ms, so if an entire track is read,
we have
about 1.86 GBITS/s (that's Gigabits/sec using 10^9) or 1.73Gbits/sec
(using 2^30)
Now the controller is capable of passing data at what? How is that
rated? Is it bytes/sec, words/sec. bits/sec, or just a clock rate that
is advertised? The advertising is usually careful NOT to say. In fact
it appears to be a clock rate.
Now we have to look at the pcide bus The AT Attachment with Packet
Interface Revision 6 Draft says there are 16 data bits. What does that
mean in raw bit rate?
Hmmm lessee, there are many sorts of messages crossing that bus, not all
of them data, and to every 512 bytes there is appended a 57-byte CRC
packet so let's agree to knock off about 10% for necessary cruft to
preserve data integrity--it's a little higher than that but so what?
133MHz (ATAPI-6) less 14Mhz is 119MHzx16bits =1.9GBITS/sec or 1.77Gbits/sec
WHOA Until we have 1rpm disks for IDE it looks like we can
transfer data a little faster than it can spin on or off the disk
But that's OK we can build up the data for a burst in an onboard buffer
or seven so that many tasks can be happening apparently simultaneously
Now the PCI bus is 32 and the extended PCI bus is 64 bits wide
Hmmm the IDE channel is only 16 bits wide so to use the PCI bus to
capacity, we need 4 times the clock rate or 4x33 or 132.
Sheesh, seems we are at the max that can work with an essentially
unbuffered transfer from memory to disk... but of course the buffering
is already there for the next of the components that advertises a speed
increase.
Now look as the fractional nanosecond values of signals for spooling
data and recall that once a cylinder boundary is reached (at 63K for
single-platter two head disks) we have to talk about stepping the heads,
and now we are talking milliseconds, a 10^6 order of magnitude change in
data rate. That is why a buffer on the disk electronics is a great idea.
The disk is the slowest component. RAID0, RAID4 or RAID5 can make a real
difference in the apparent performance of disk transfers by making
stepping a less frequent event (with the right chunk size defined, of
course.).
Civileme
I'm curious as to wether you have any recommendations for chunk sizes.
Here's what I've got set up now:
raiddev /dev/md0
raid-level1
chunk-size32k
persistent-superblock 1
nr-raid-disks 2
device/dev/hde5
raid-disk 0
device/dev/hdg5
raid-disk 1
raiddev /dev/md1
raid-level0
chunk-size32k
persistent-superblock 1
___
I've got two identical IBM deskstars in place, with the prefetch set at
4k:
___
[root@tamriel elx]# hdparm -a /dev/hde
/dev/hde:
readahead= 8 (on)
___
Hdparm gives the following information:
[root@tamriel elx]# hdparm -i /dev/hde
/dev/hde:
Model=IBM-DTLA-307030, FwRev=TX4OA60A, SerialNo=YKEYKTYJ069
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw15uSec Fixed DTR10Mbs }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=40
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=1916kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=-66060037, LBA=yes, LBAsects=60036480
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255)
Drive Supports : ATA/ATAPI-5 T13 1321D revision 1 : ATA-2 ATA-3 ATA-4
ATA-5
_
The question I have for you is, could I better optimize the system with
chunk sizes other than 32k?
Thanks,
LX
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
remember we have a 63 sector track with 512 byte sectors 31.5k
and we usually have two of them 31.5+31.5 =63k
So 64k chunk is a bad idea if you have single-platter drives--every
chunk represents a head step before a drive switch.
And 32 k chunk means drives switch once before the head steps-cutting
stepping events in half, and they are more than 90% of the time spent by
drives in accessing.
Hmmm 21k sounds even better, cause you switch switch switch switch
switch switch then a read makes the heads step... This could destroy
threading of drive requests though.
I think 32 is a good starting number,
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 19 May 2002, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: I've been looking at the hard drive scene over the last few months in preparation for purchasing a new system. I've got most of the hardware details sorted out, but there is one area that I'm not quite settled on: hard drives. I am basically looking for an affordable 80GB IDE drive that can deliver fast and reliable (i.e. able to run 24x7) performance. I want to buy two of them so I can make a RAID0 out of them. Of course, they need to play well with Linux, and with any other 'alternate' OS/kernel I throw at it. From what I have read, that rules out Western Digital. Since I prize reliability, that would rule out IBM (IBM is offloading their hard drive business to Hitachi, so that's another minus for them). So the way I see it, only Seagate and Maxtor are still in the race. I checked out storagereview.com and the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (AKA 'Viper') 80GB appears to be neck-and-neck with the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80GB. Any thoughts, people? Thx. Hi Sridhar, I'm surprised that no-one has recommended Seagate drives yet! They are what I use in _all_ of my machines, and all of my customer's machines. I have never had any problems with them, at all. Aside from that fact, they're dirt cheap at the moment. Well, in Australia at least. Ashley -- Ashley Reynolds [EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Tuesday 21 May 2002 12:09 am, dfox wrote: Yes...very interested. Master Jedi Dfox may be interested as well. ;) Yeah, it might prove interesting. I've heard people network to them and control them from Linux. I wouldn't be suprised to see a regular PC like drive in there. My brother recently took apart a spare Dish Network My DirecTivo came with a 3.5 in 40G Maxtor drive in it. My previous Dishplayer had a 17 G drive that is now in my kids PC. I think it is a Quantum but cannot remember for sure. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Tue, 21 May 2002, Ronald J. Hall wrote: Lyvim Xaphir wrote: Was that one of those Atari's that came with pc-compatible slots? And a motorola processor, maybe? LX It did have a Motorola 68030 CPU... but no PC slots, I'm afraid. Very proprietary hardware but I loved it. I ran Atari computers for years...even ran an Atari based BBS that was very popular here, until the 'Net took things over. I remember those -- never had one though. My experience with the ST series was limited to the 520 and 1040. Great machines, and they even had a unix clone. My first C programs were done on the 520ST using the Megamax compilers (it was a math graphing application). Would you like to see a pic of my Atari desktop (offlist, of course). File it under Ripleys Believe it or not, but its running a special version of Unix, well...actually a mix of BSD, Unix and Linux... Can you copy me on a few of these? Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Tue, 2002-05-21 at 02:09, James wrote: I've generally had good luck with Fujitsu's but did run into an interesting problem with a 6 gig version of it. We bought a lot of 100 of the drives with a previous company I was with. In the production line the drives had installed on them a whopping 75 megs of FreeBSD and our software. Normally a drive to drive clone took on the order of 30 minutes (multiple drives on the receive end would slow it down somewhat) What we did run into was 2 cases of drives (12 to a case) that were the slowest clones I'd ever seen 16 hours to write 75 megs (limited production test in our shop run once a problem had been found on the line.) and format the drives. Once they were finished they ran just fine. As long as you never had to write to them again. A 100k copy from cd to HDD could take 25 to 30 minutes. Fujitsu sent out a rep to look at the problem we had and left us two cases of 10 gig drives for our trouble. (The gesture was appreciated but 6 gigs was already overkill.) Never did find out why but it seemed to be a bad lot. James You probably won't believe this, but I had a very similar experience with those fujitsu laptop drives. Reading off a drive image was no problem; but writing it back took an entire night, using dd. Otherwise they functioned normally, with no wierdisms. Anyway, I got the job done and passed the anomaly off as something I'd never get the answer to. LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Tuesday 21 May 2002 12:24 am, you wrote: Yeah...I'd love to see it! What'd you do, patch together a special version of Unix or something? LX I can't take credit for it. A dedicated group of Atarians did it - to the benefit of the rest of us... There is still a hardcore group of Atari users (just like the Amiga) out there. I have to admit - I still have an old Atari that I fire up from time to time...just waxing nostalgic I guess. ;-) I'll send a couple of JPG's as attachments to your e-mail address. They are not very big but you can see what it looked like. :-) -- /\ DarkLord \/ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Lyvim Xaphir wrote: On Mon, 2002-05-20 at 23:13, FemmeFatale wrote: I have a pic of one I can scan that was opened like a can of beans if you want it... offlist of course. -- Femme Yes...very interested. Master Jedi Dfox may be interested as well. ;) Thanks, Femme! LX The Article I referred to appeared in the March issue of Maximum PC. Its an article on how to hack you TIVO PVR. I have made it available as a zip file for anyone on this list who wishes it. Its on my ftp, which I will leave up for a week 24/7 for those who wish to access it. The actual path is the home dir that the acct has been assigned. To login simply use any ftp client Connect to: 142.173.217.236, port number 21 Login: linux Password: linux NOTE: the login/pass IS CASE SENSITIVE. The file you want is called tivo.zip. If someone wants just the scanned files NOT in .zip format pls email me pvtly. Also in that directory is a bunch of saved newbie/expert questions answers from these lists. For those interested in MP3's, there is a hidden MP3 directory. simply access d:\mp3. For those who care, in the home directory along with tivo.zip is another file for USB users on how to get it up running with linux. If there is interest I may scan another article for ppl wanting Camera/usb info too for linux. You may leech away ladies gentleman. The ftp will stay as long as it is used for those who dislike sharing music, please take no offense. This was simply the fastest most convenient way to dispense the scanned article to those who wish it. Thank You. Please don't Hammer the ftp though! If its down or screwed please email me pvtly with your concern/rant/bitch :) -- Femme Good Decisions You boss Made: We'll do as you suggest and go with Linux. I've always liked that character from Peanuts. - Source: Dilbert Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
FemmeFatale wrote: The Article I referred to appeared in the March issue of Maximum PC. Its an article on how to hack you TIVO PVR. I have made it available as a zip file for anyone on this list who wishes it. Its on my ftp, which I will leave up for a week 24/7 for those who wish to access it. The actual path is the home dir that the acct has been assigned. To login simply use any ftp client Connect to: 142.173.217.236, port number 21 Login: linux Password: linux NOTE: the login/pass IS CASE SENSITIVE. The file you want is called tivo.zip. If someone wants just the scanned files NOT in .zip format pls email me pvtly. Also in that directory is a bunch of saved newbie/expert questions answers from these lists. For those interested in MP3's, there is a hidden MP3 directory. simply access d:\mp3. For those who care, in the home directory along with tivo.zip is another file for USB users on how to get it up running with linux. If there is interest I may scan another article for ppl wanting Camera/usb info too for linux. You may leech away ladies gentleman. The ftp will stay as long as it is used for those who dislike sharing music, please take no offense. This was simply the fastest most convenient way to dispense the scanned article to those who wish it. Thank You. Please don't Hammer the ftp though! If its down or screwed please email me pvtly with your concern/rant/bitch :) -- Femme Something I forgot to add was that I limited the bandwith 10KBps per user. Maximum of 6 allowed on the ftp at once. So if you don't get on the first time please try again :) -- Femme Good Decisions You boss Made: We'll do as you suggest and go with Linux. I've always liked that character from Peanuts. - Source: Dilbert Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Tue, 21 May 2002, darklord wrote: I'll send a couple of JPG's as attachments to your e-mail address. They are not very big but you can see what it looked like. :-) -- /\ DarkLord \/ Ashley -- Ashley Reynolds [EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Wed, 22 May 2002, Ashley Reynolds wrote: On Tue, 21 May 2002, darklord wrote: I'll send a couple of JPG's as attachments to your e-mail address. They are not very big but you can see what it looked like. :-) I'm sorry, that previous message was supposed to read: Darklord, could you send them to me too? [EMAIL PROTECTED] I must have hit Ctrl+X instead of Ctrl+C. ;) Ashley -- Ashley Reynolds [EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
My DirecTivo came with a 3.5 in 40G Maxtor drive in it. My previous=20 Dishplayer had a 17 G drive that is now in my kids PC. I think it is a=20 Quantum but cannot remember for sure. ISTR my brother saying they had a couple different models. He also had a PC quantum drive (6 gig I think) fail fairly early in life. His other drives are SCSI on the main machine -- he says one of them went south a while back. I don't recall the details, oh well. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Wed, 2002-05-22 at 00:07, dfox wrote: My DirecTivo came with a 3.5 in 40G Maxtor drive in it. My previous=20 Dishplayer had a 17 G drive that is now in my kids PC. I think it is a=20 Quantum but cannot remember for sure. ISTR my brother saying they had a couple different models. He also had a PC quantum drive (6 gig I think) fail fairly early in life. His other drives are SCSI on the main machine -- he says one of them went south a while back. I don't recall the details, oh well. Can you get a brand name next time you talk to him? LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Can you get a brand name next time you talk to him? ok will do. I sent him an email just now... LX Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Mon, 2002-05-20 at 01:40, dfox wrote: Hmm. Any idea what the set-top boxes might use (tivo, dish network, mp3 players etc.) ? One would seemingly want to have at least as good (if not better) reliability because these drives can easily get more usage (in terms of writes/rewrites) than the typical desktop or server machine. For instance, the drives in embeeded tivo-type devices are routinely re-recording a section of disk with new video as long as there is power to the machine. This is at least true with dish network combo digital video recorders/dish tuner boxes. The other day I opened up a store bought system, and was bowled over to see an oem fujitsu drive inside. Very interesting. I don't like assembly line systems; the custom approach is much better. But this looked like at least one thing they did right inside that box. I also ran into a couple of fujitsu 2.5 form factor drives in a proprietary kiosk a while back, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well they integrated into a desktop machine; no wierdisms with slave/master stuff like with some other laptop drives I've seen. But I've never seen the inside of a Tivo...would be interesting to hear about that! LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Monday 20 May 2002 09:56 pm, you wrote: The other day I opened up a store bought system, and was bowled over to see an oem fujitsu drive inside. Very interesting. I don't like assembly line systems; the custom approach is much better. But this looked like at least one thing they did right inside that box. I also ran into a couple of fujitsu 2.5 form factor drives in a proprietary kiosk a while back, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well they integrated into a desktop machine; no wierdisms with slave/master stuff like with some other laptop drives I've seen. But I've never seen the inside of a Tivo...would be interesting to hear about that! LX Can't comment about the Tivo (although I think they look interesting!) but my old 1992 Atari Falcon 030 computer used to use a Fujitsu (80 megs! Wow!) 2.5 inch IDE drive...never had a problem out of it... Still rather use it than use a Win-box grin -- /\ DarkLord \/ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Lyvim Xaphir wrote: On Mon, 2002-05-20 at 01:40, dfox wrote: Hmm. Any idea what the set-top boxes might use (tivo, dish network, mp3 players etc.) ? One would seemingly want to have at least as good (if not better) reliability because these drives can easily get more usage (in terms of writes/rewrites) than the typical desktop or server machine. For instance, the drives in embeeded tivo-type devices are routinely re-recording a section of disk with new video as long as there is power to the machine. This is at least true with dish network combo digital video recorders/dish tuner boxes. The other day I opened up a store bought system, and was bowled over to see an oem fujitsu drive inside. Very interesting. I don't like assembly line systems; the custom approach is much better. But this looked like at least one thing they did right inside that box. I also ran into a couple of fujitsu 2.5 form factor drives in a proprietary kiosk a while back, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well they integrated into a desktop machine; no wierdisms with slave/master stuff like with some other laptop drives I've seen. But I've never seen the inside of a Tivo...would be interesting to hear about that! LX I have a pic of one I can scan that was opened like a can of beans if you want it... offlist of course. -- Femme Good Decisions You boss Made: We'll do as you suggest and go with Linux. I've always liked that character from Peanuts. - Source: Dilbert Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Mon, 2002-05-20 at 22:57, darklord wrote: Can't comment about the Tivo (although I think they look interesting!) but my old 1992 Atari Falcon 030 computer used to use a Fujitsu (80 megs! Wow!) 2.5 inch IDE drive...never had a problem out of it... Still rather use it than use a Win-box grin Was that one of those Atari's that came with pc-compatible slots? And a motorola processor, maybe? LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Mon, 2002-05-20 at 23:13, FemmeFatale wrote: I have a pic of one I can scan that was opened like a can of beans if you want it... offlist of course. -- Femme Yes...very interested. Master Jedi Dfox may be interested as well. ;) Thanks, Femme! LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Lyvim Xaphir wrote: Was that one of those Atari's that came with pc-compatible slots? And a motorola processor, maybe? LX It did have a Motorola 68030 CPU... but no PC slots, I'm afraid. Very proprietary hardware but I loved it. I ran Atari computers for years...even ran an Atari based BBS that was very popular here, until the 'Net took things over. Would you like to see a pic of my Atari desktop (offlist, of course). File it under Ripleys Believe it or not, but its running a special version of Unix, well...actually a mix of BSD, Unix and Linux... Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Yes...very interested. Master Jedi Dfox may be interested as well. ;) Yeah, it might prove interesting. I've heard people network to them and control them from Linux. I wouldn't be suprised to see a regular PC like drive in there. My brother recently took apart a spare Dish Network controller (similar to Tivo in the digital recording dept) and just added the drive to his spare computer. I didn't ask him what brand the HD was. He did notice wierd 'formatting' problems from time to time, but probably that was software - like frames of the Simpsons coming up during a recording of wrestling or what have you. LX Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Most of those links (and others) refer to IBM HDD's over 40GB havin problems. I just recently had a 10 month old, IBM 30GB 7200rpm ata/100 2mb drive fail. My Linux drive ;( Mechanical problem. The Ouch... Mine's the same drive, from about Oct 2000. Here's to crossing fingers :). Tom BrinkmanCorpus Christi, Texas Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Tue, 2002-05-21 at 00:01, Ronald J. Hall wrote: Lyvim Xaphir wrote: Was that one of those Atari's that came with pc-compatible slots? And a motorola processor, maybe? LX It did have a Motorola 68030 CPU... but no PC slots, I'm afraid. Very proprietary hardware but I loved it. I ran Atari computers for years...even ran an Atari based BBS that was very popular here, until the 'Net took things over. Would you like to see a pic of my Atari desktop (offlist, of course). File it under Ripleys Believe it or not, but its running a special version of Unix, well...actually a mix of BSD, Unix and Linux... Yeah...I'd love to see it! What'd you do, patch together a special version of Unix or something? LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 19 May 2002 15:44:54 +1000 Sridhar Dhanapalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Have you used any IBM drives made in the past year? Until about a year ago IBM drives were renowned for their reliability, and I used to recommend IBM to all my friends. Since then, they have suffered reliability problems, and the return rate for IBM drives has been high. There was even a class-action lawsuit launched against IBM last year, since so many people's drives failed (I think this was settled out of court). IBM have been first to develop and implement all sorts of new technologies, including glass platters and that 'pixie dust' stuff. It looks as if they're having major teething problems with these new technologies. There was some controversy a few weeks ago when IBM placed warnings on their new drives indicating that they shouldn't be used for more than eight hours per day. If that isn't an indication of poor reliability, then I don't know what is. With all these quality control problems, and IBM's recent financial woes, I am not surprised that they have decided to sell their hard drive unit to Hitachi. I have a 60GB Deskstar that I got in late Dec. It is not the 60GXP, which is the drive that IBM had the QC problem with but is based on either the 75GXP or the 120GXP, most likely the 120GXP. As to the 120GXP itself the following is from the WatchDog column of this months (June/82) issue of MaximumPC Mag IBM got into hot water with consumers when it published a spec sheet with a 'power-on' rating for its popular 120GXP hard drives.The spec suggested that the hard drive could be safely left on for a total of just 333 hours a month. The Dog's investigation has discovered that, despite the published 'power-on' spec, IBM designs and tests its hard drives to withstand 24 hour-a-day use, and honors such use in its warranty. IBM has since redacted its spec sheet to remove the inflammatory power rating. Currently I have 6 systems running 24/7. Of 15 hds, 9 are IBM Deskstar and 7 are MaxtorPlus. The drives ages range from 5 years to 6 months. In that 5 year span I have suffered only 1 hd failure, a Maxtor, which was replaced. When in the market for a hd if it is on sale or I want 1 today I get the MaxtorPlus retail box (IBM is not available locally). If purchasing on the net I go OEM IBM Deskstar. In my book they both rate as equals in outstanding quality and performance, and with the 1 exception I have yet to be disappointed by either. Charles Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On 19 May 2002 00:25:02 -0400, you wrote: On Sat, 2002-05-18 at 22:11, KevinO wrote: IBM I heartily second this. I set up a web company on IBM's over three years ago, and they've been running 24/7 ever since. Last week the technical director told me it was one of the best things I ever did; he's sold on the hardware. The irony is, I recently read that IBM is getting out of the hard drive business. I don't know if that means selling off that arm, or stopping production. Anybody know more? Steve Stephen B. Browne [EMAIL PROTECTED] Veritas odit moras Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 23:50, Tom Brinkman wrote: Most of those links (and others) refer to IBM HDD's over 40GB havin problems. I just recently had a 10 month old, IBM 30GB 7200rpm ata/100 2mb drive fail. My Linux drive ;( Mechanical problem. The drive was used 24/7, but after being shutdown for a week while I was out'a town, it wouldn't spin up when I booted the system. System wouldn't even boot with that drive connected. Fortunately I had most of the stuff I needed from that drive backed up to CD's. I replaced it with a Maxtor 40GB. OTOH, my Windoze drive is a several years old IBM 7200rpm, ata/66 13.6GB. Never has a problem . yet ;) -- Tom BrinkmanCorpus Christi, Texas I remember back in it's Y2K - the end is nigh! days, a warning from some advisory group - maybe Gartner - that drives running 24/7 on systems being shutdown over the danger period were likely never to spin up again. I think it was something about the heads getting stuck to the platters. While they kept spinning, or during very short power downs, everything stayed warm and smooth, but when they got cold... Anyway - sounds like what happened to you. Sounds like a good reason for a UPS - well, another good reason. Brian Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Question for you guys, why do you dislike WD hard drives? I've currently got a 20GB 7200 in my server and it runs beautifully. It's quiet, I've never had a problem with it, and it's plenty fast. I know of all the IBM hard drive problems, however where are these WD problems comming from? NB On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 10:25, Brian Parish wrote: On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 23:50, Tom Brinkman wrote: Most of those links (and others) refer to IBM HDD's over 40GB havin problems. I just recently had a 10 month old, IBM 30GB 7200rpm ata/100 2mb drive fail. My Linux drive ;( Mechanical problem. The drive was used 24/7, but after being shutdown for a week while I was out'a town, it wouldn't spin up when I booted the system. System wouldn't even boot with that drive connected. Fortunately I had most of the stuff I needed from that drive backed up to CD's. I replaced it with a Maxtor 40GB. OTOH, my Windoze drive is a several years old IBM 7200rpm, ata/66 13.6GB. Never has a problem . yet ;) -- Tom BrinkmanCorpus Christi, Texas I remember back in it's Y2K - the end is nigh! days, a warning from some advisory group - maybe Gartner - that drives running 24/7 on systems being shutdown over the danger period were likely never to spin up again. I think it was something about the heads getting stuck to the platters. While they kept spinning, or during very short power downs, everything stayed warm and smooth, but when they got cold... Anyway - sounds like what happened to you. Sounds like a good reason for a UPS - well, another good reason. Brian Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 19 May 2002 08:50:50 -0500, Tom Brinkman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sunday 19 May 2002 02:51 am, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: I did a quick web search and found a few relevant pages: http://theregister.co.uk/content/53/24896.html http://theregister.co.uk/content/archive/22412.html http://news.com.com/2100-1001-866602.html?legacy=cnettag=lh http://www.viahardware.com/ibm120gxp.shtm In my last post I was writing from memory, so some of the details were not quite accurate. For example, IBM is only (!) selling 70% of its HDD business to Hitachi, and the new business will be a Hitachi-IBM joint venture. Also, the recommended maximum usage for the new IBM drives is on average 11 hours per day (not eight as I had previously mentioned). But the fact remains: if the drives are reliable, why would IBM feel the need to do this? No other manufacturer does. Most of those links (and others) refer to IBM HDD's over 40GB havin problems. I just recently had a 10 month old, IBM 30GB 7200rpm ata/100 2mb drive fail. My Linux drive ;( Mechanical problem. The drive was used 24/7, but after being shutdown for a week while I was out'a town, it wouldn't spin up when I booted the system. System wouldn't even boot with that drive connected. Fortunately I had most of the stuff I needed from that drive backed up to CD's. I replaced it with a Maxtor 40GB. Hardware generally receive the most stress when initially powered on. The sudden 'spike' of electricity (as opposed to the steady stream they receive when they're running) can just be too much for some devices. It's not uncommon for servers which had been running flawlessly for ages to fall over after a power cycle. OTOH, my Windoze drive is a several years old IBM 7200rpm, ata/66 13.6GB. Never has a problem . yet ;) I have two hard drives on my present system. One (the larger and newer one) holds Mandrake and the other holds Win98 and my Linux swap. The second drive runs fine in Windows. However, if I try mounting the Windows FAT32 partition in Linux, my system will freeze after a random interval. The funny thing is that the Linux swap partition on that same drive poses no such problem. I think the problem is that manufacturers design and test their drives for Windows and not for anything else. Linux likes to push hardware hard, and some cheap quality or out-of-spec devices (e.g. Western Digital drives) don't like this. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan Windows 2000, Users Zilch. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sunday 19 May 2002 10:26 am, Nelson Bartley wrote: Question for you guys, why do you dislike WD hard drives? I've currently got a 20GB 7200 in my server and it runs beautifully. It's quiet, I've never had a problem with it, and it's plenty fast. I know of all the IBM hard drive problems, however where are these WD problems comming from? Much the same as the reports of IBM problems in the last year, in late '97, early '98, more serious reports of WD problems surfaced. WD's RMA rate went sky high, they even had to recall a few models. So IME, (I use to use WD's), they haven't been worth buyin since. Also, search for Civileme's WD reports on the list archives. Problems with Linux support, CRC shortcuts/errors, etc. IOW's win-hardware. -- Tom BrinkmanCorpus Christi, Texas Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 12:05, Tom Brinkman wrote: I've got a APC BakUPS 500, had it for a long time ;p Normally, just leavin the house for a day or so, I'd leave the system runnin. But this last time I was gone for 8 days, so I shut it down. It's been shutdown that long before. 'Sides, if a HDD can't stand to be off, get 'cold' (room temp), then restart it's defective IMO. I agree totally; and I think the same principle applies to the rest of the system also. Also, FWIW, when I called IBM for an RMA, I asked if there were known issues with FS's other than vfat, specifically ResierFS and XFS. The tech didn't even know what I was talkin about, but he went and asked and came back with a 'none known'. ...and also FWIW, both the IBM and the Maxtor replacement were/ are ata/100 7200rpm 2mb buffer IDE drives. hdparm -t for the IBM was never better than 36mb/sec, often nearer to 30. The Maxtor consistently gets 40mb/sec.and sells for damn near half what I paid for that IBM just 10 months ago, and it's 10GB bigger. -- Tom BrinkmanCorpus Christi, Texas I'm still a little leery about maxtor reliability. What's your take on that? LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Saturday 18 May 2002 10:11 pm, you wrote: IBM I just bought 4 more from : http://www.mwave.com I currently have at least a dozen modern IBM HDs spinning 24x7 here. I've never had a problem with any of them. They're real fast with or without raid. hdparm reported 35MB/s throughput with Mandrake 8.2, 40 GB IBM 7200RPM, stock kernel and no hdparm settings. This was with a Tyan 2460 and dual Athlon MP1600+. I have had seagate, maxtor, and western digital drives fail. :-( Ditto. I've got v8.2 running on a 60 gig/7200rpm IBM Deskstar, and I get that same kind of performancein fact, everytime I messed with Hdparm, the performance went down - just goes to show, if it ain't broke, don't fix it! grin -- /\ DarkLord \/ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sunday 19 May 2002 03:16 am, you wrote: Ugh. This is not good at all. And it is true that my information is slightly dated; the two IBM Deskstar's I have here are about a year old. Where did you get this information? Any links? LX No, that certainly would not be good. The question is, LX, did your drives have that 8 hours a day warning on them? I know mine certainly didn't. I got it from Dirt Cheap Drives... -- /\ DarkLord \/ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
been shutdown that long before. 'Sides, if a HDD can't stand to be off, get 'cold' (room temp), then restart it's defective IMO. Well, yeah, that's self-evident :). Besides, most (non-Linux) usage of the drives feature frequent powerup/shutdown cycles, so that should be nothing new. Also, FWIW, when I called IBM for an RMA, I asked if there were known issues with FS's other than vfat, specifically ResierFS and Why should there be? The drive would just access data differently than if the same data were accessed by Windows. consistently gets 40mb/sec.and sells for damn near half what I paid for that IBM just 10 months ago, and it's 10GB bigger. My 30 meg deskstar (purchased 10/2000) is still humming very nicely. I haven't managed to fill it up yet :). I have had very little success with seagates, but the last seagate I bought was back in around 1991 :(. My older Maxtor drive lasted nearly 7 years before I took it out - I probably could plug it back in now and it would still work like it was brand new (ca. 1993 brand new, but wtf). My other drive (1.6 gig maxtor) is pretty clean, but there have been one or two bad spots on the drive surface since I got it back in 1996, so right now I'm just using it for /var. Everything is reiserfs here, except for /var, which is ext3, because I couldn't figure out how to use badblocks in conjuction with reiserfs, and mkreiserfs doesn't seem to have a bad block checking option. Tom BrinkmanCorpus Christi, Texas Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 09:15, Steve Browne wrote: On 19 May 2002 00:25:02 -0400, you wrote: On Sat, 2002-05-18 at 22:11, KevinO wrote: IBM I heartily second this. I set up a web company on IBM's over three years ago, and they've been running 24/7 ever since. Last week the technical director told me it was one of the best things I ever did; he's sold on the hardware. The irony is, I recently read that IBM is getting out of the hard drive business. I don't know if that means selling off that arm, or stopping production. Anybody know more? Steve Stephen B. Browne [EMAIL PROTECTED] Veritas odit moras Sridhar read something stating that IBM was selling 70% of it's hard drive division to Hitachi. There are more information links in one of his posts earlier in this thread. LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 01:44, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: Have you used any IBM drives made in the past year? Until about a year ago IBM drives were renowned for their reliability, and I used to recommend IBM to all my friends. Since then, they have suffered reliability problems, and the return rate for IBM drives has been high. There was even a class-action lawsuit launched against IBM last year, since so many people's drives failed (I think this was settled out of court). IBM have been first to develop and implement all sorts of new technologies, including glass platters and that 'pixie dust' stuff. It looks as if they're having major teething problems with these new technologies. There was some controversy a few weeks ago when IBM placed warnings on their new drives indicating that they shouldn't be used for more than eight hours per day. If that isn't an indication of poor reliability, then I don't know what is. With all these quality control problems, and IBM's recent financial woes, I am not surprised that they have decided to sell their hard drive unit to Hitachi. If you're wondering where I get all this stuff, it is The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk). Therein may lie a problem. I love the Reg just as much as the next guy, but if you read too much Reg you can get depressed; it's a very cynically oriented publication. The last Mandrake article was evidence of that to me. Every company is going to have problems sooner or later. For a company with an aboveboard reputation in it's arena, such problems are even more subject to journalistic overblow than normal. There still need to be benchmarks and hard data correlated with what the journalists are saying, and more significantly, what the peeps here on the expert list are saying about their personal experiences. Asking the question here was a good step; the data provided here on this thread will give a context to the negative reports on IBM, IMO. For me, IBM was a natural choice until this string of incidents. WD is out of the picture, since they don't correctly follow the ATA spec. That leaves Seagate and Maxtor. Not really; that's sort of a mule blinder perspective. There are more companies out there; like Fujitsu and Hitachi. But not Samsung. ;) LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 09:06, Charles A Edwards wrote: I have a 60GB Deskstar that I got in late Dec. It is not the 60GXP, which is the drive that IBM had the QC problem with but is based on either the 75GXP or the 120GXP, most likely the 120GXP. As to the 120GXP itself the following is from the WatchDog column of this months (June/82) issue of MaximumPC Mag IBM got into hot water with consumers when it published a spec sheet with a 'power-on' rating for its popular 120GXP hard drives.The spec suggested that the hard drive could be safely left on for a total of just 333 hours a month. The Dog's investigation has discovered that, despite the published 'power-on' spec, IBM designs and tests its hard drives to withstand 24 hour-a-day use, and honors such use in its warranty. IBM has since redacted its spec sheet to remove the inflammatory power rating. I remember reading this, but I could not remember the source of the information; thanks for posting this ! Currently I have 6 systems running 24/7. Of 15 hds, 9 are IBM Deskstar and 7 are MaxtorPlus. The drives ages range from 5 years to 6 months. In that 5 year span I have suffered only 1 hd failure, a Maxtor, which was replaced. I have owned several maxtors and samsungs, and the worst failures I have ever experienced have been with samsung drives; this was both IDE and SCSI versions. After my last Samsung experience I vowed never to buy another Samsung again. The Maxtors were not as reliable as either the IBM's or the Fujitsu's. I have two Fujitsu's here that are still working after 6 years. If indeed I was forced to make another buying decision other than IBM (which I'm not totally convinced I need to do yet), then I believe I would go back to Fujitsu. I would not go back to either Seagate, or Western Digital; I don't think that the quality is there. Maxtor is still a big maybe. Before that I'd go with either Hitachi or Fujitsu. For now, unless I or someone else really gets burned, I will probably stick with IBM. Especially since you reminded me of the Watchdog article in MaximumPC, Charles. When in the market for a hd if it is on sale or I want 1 today I get the MaxtorPlus retail box (IBM is not available locally). If purchasing on the net I go OEM IBM Deskstar. In my book they both rate as equals in outstanding quality and performance, and with the 1 exception I have yet to be disappointed by either. Charles LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Nelson Bartley wrote:
Question for you guys, why do you dislike WD hard drives?
I've currently got a 20GB 7200 in my server and it runs beautifully.
It's quiet, I've never had a problem with it, and it's plenty fast. I
know of all the IBM hard drive problems, however where are these WD
problems comming from?
NB
OK
Firest of all, WD is made about as cheap as possible. It has a single
platter and two heads, which makes the track density about as high as
the technology will allow. Other manufactirers tend to use more
platters and more heads, and sometimes dedicate one head to clocking the
data on the others.
WD reps have stated unequivocally at several shows that they DO NOT
support linux at all, only Windows and Solaris. That tends to indicate
that there is something seriously out of spec with there stuff since
they are unwilling to risk broad scrutiny with highly optimized linux
drivers. It also suggests that they have submitted their own drivers to
those op systems which tend to cover deficiencies in hardware.
My experience with WD drives includes a WD200AB which ran on a RedHat
system at a whopping 1.62Mb/s when set to UDMA66.. I tinkered with the
settings using hdparm and eventually settled on UDMA33 with a
performance increase to over 9M/s.
I use a WD64AA to reproduce disk errors and find workarounds for support
purposes. It does signal service. I can always count on it for
Seems like memory missing as install crashes
hda: lost interrupt
0x51 {DriveReadySeekComplete}
Type errors on a randomly occurring basis. I know if I can tweak the
chipset and the kernel to manage that drive, I can tell the customer
what to do to get running, besides swapping out his horrid disks.
WD has an extended track record of failures and bad drives. I once
called them about a faulty drive, and it was the smoothest sales
experience I EVER had. They obviously do not short their customer
relations department. But then that is spending money to do over the
job that wasn't done properly the first time, and seems to me to be a
scary mismanagement. Build it right the first time,,, An airline tha
has a VP in charge of lost luggage would scare me just as much.
Now, on to facts about testing by Mr. Linux-ide himself.
http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt2214_54.epl#2
Yes, it is not recent, but WD hasn't changed. They still have odd
timing and they still have a very bad workaround for leaving out the
hardware to do 57-byte CRCs and the result is a noise in transmission
from the computer becomes a permanent error on read-back. The blow-off
makes it look like the drive is faster but at the expense of a gamble on
data integrity. Anyone around computers for a while knows that if an
error has nonzero probability, it doesn't matter what the odds against
it are, it WILL occur, and the probability only tells you how often to
expect it. And the hardware/software implementation had better chack
for it and setup a recovery. And WD seems to rely on the low
probability, which is just how Andre Hedrick characterizes it.
And I am still seeing 8 times as many reports of problems with install
or stability from WD owners as from Seagate owners. I rarely see any
from Maxtor owners, and even the slew of reports lately from owners of
recent IBM disks who are running them 24/7 does not match the continured
high level of complaints (about our OS) from WD owners.
Civileme
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Sunday 19 May 2002 9:26 pm, civileme wrote: And I am still seeing 8 times as many reports of problems with install or stability from WD owners as from Seagate owners. I rarely see any from Maxtor owners, and even the slew of reports lately from owners of recent IBM disks who are running them 24/7 does not match the continured high level of complaints (about our OS) from WD owners. This [cheap manufacture and lack of optimisation under Windows] probably explains why my 3-year-old WD drive blew with a loud bang a couple of weeks after I switched to Linux ;) I now have an ATA100 7200rpm 40GB IBM which is working wonderfully well. Alastair - -- Alastair Scott (London, United Kingdom) http://www.unmetered.org.uk/ -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE86A4SCv59vFiSU4YRArYrAJ9Hng0DEr4G9+NKD6vrqAPiIJfo4ACfd6vz YaujZDTgDpo+QuOYz17+LlM= =IkR5 -END PGP SIGNATURE- Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Nelson Bartley wrote: Question for you guys, why do you dislike WD hard drives? They are the hardware equivalent of Internet Exploder, designed for windoze, which means compliance only with WD/M$ standards, not industry standards. Other drive makers have conformed to the various ATA specs over the years, while WD has their own EIDE specs, theoretically compatible with ATA (and also theoretically supersets of ATA specs), but not in the real world. Ignoring their poorer than average reliability, [in windoze] they work fine as long as they are the only IDE device on a channel. Mix them with other brands on the same channel, and their non-compliance with ATA specs can be trouble. Example: unless they've changed since last I checked, WD drives have three different jumper settings, Master, Slave, Single. ATA drives only have two, Master/Single, and Slave. -- . . . wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her.Proverbs 8:11 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://mrmazda.members.atlantic.net/ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sunday 19 May 2002 11:48 am, Lyvim Xaphir wrote: I'm still a little leery about maxtor reliability. What's your take on that? LX Can't say, I've only had it a few weeks. First one too, Maxtor's have never been an overclockers favorite. IBM and Quantum always held the crown for 'takes a lickin and keeps on tickin', specially on an off spec PCI bus. Tho I've got a 1.4 Tbird at 1.55, it's all done by upping the multiplier, the FSB is up just a touch (135mz) so the PCI is in spec (135/4). PwrSupply is a Sparkle 300w, provides clean steady 12v 5 V, Vcore and IO too. We'll see ; I think all new drives are a risk, what with the platter density, the high rpms, and these gimmicks (ata/100, 133) to get a touch more out'a 'em, on the old 33mhz pci bus. Bench's look great, real world doesn't reflect it that much. Reliability is sufferin at the expense of marketing and price points, all brands of drives. 'Course then again, backing up to CDr's is fairly cheap ; -- Tom BrinkmanCorpus Christi, Texas Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 19 May 2002 10:07:23 +0200 Wolfgang Bornath [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 17:51 +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: In my last post I was writing from memory, so some of the details were not quite accurate. For example, IBM is only (!) selling 70% of its HDD business to Hitachi, and the new business will be a Hitachi-IBM joint venture. Also, the recommended maximum usage for the new IBM drives is on average 11 hours per day(not eight as I had previously mentioned). But the fact remains: if the drives are reliable, why would IBM feel the need to do this? No other manufacturer does. Because nobody with extended computing requirements would buy such a device. It would not suit my needs because one of my computers runs 24/7. It's my mail news server and it also works for a distributed computing project during idle time. Do they say how long the 'recommended' rest between hours of operation should be? Another 11 hours? Ridiculous! Kind of reminds me of a line from User Friendly when the Marketing Guy said But down time is good for servers, it gives them a chance to rest!!! He was speaking about a product from Washington State when he said that of course. wobo -- Registered Linux User 228909 Powered By Mandrake Linux 8.1 - Microsoft, Windows, Bugs, Lacking Features, IRQ Conflicts, System Crashes, Non-Functional Multitasking and The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Washington, USA. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On 20 May 2002 00:25:02 +1000 Brian Parish [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 23:50, Tom Brinkman wrote: Most of those links (and others) refer to IBM HDD's over 40GB havin problems. I just recently had a 10 month old, IBM 30GB 7200rpm ata/100 2mb drive fail. My Linux drive ;( Mechanical problem. The drive was used 24/7, but after being shutdown for a week while I was out'a town, it wouldn't spin up when I booted the system. System wouldn't even boot with that drive connected. Fortunately I had most of the stuff I needed from that drive backed up to CD's. I replaced it with a Maxtor 40GB. OTOH, my Windoze drive is a several years old IBM 7200rpm, ata/66 13.6GB. Never has a problem . yet ;) -- Tom BrinkmanCorpus Christi, Texas I remember back in it's Y2K - the end is nigh! days, a warning from some advisory group - maybe Gartner - that drives running 24/7 on systems being shutdown over the danger period were likely never to spin up again. I think it was something about the heads getting stuck to the platters. While they kept spinning, or during very short power downs, everything stayed warm and smooth, but when they got cold... Anyway - sounds like what happened to you. Sounds like a good reason for a UPS - well, another good reason. Remembering back to the days when HDD's were measured in pounds. I could suggest this as a probability. We had some old AMPeg (yes AMPeg) HDD's about 50 meg I believe that had trouble spinning up if you ever shut them down. When they were new, no problem. But over time the motor that spun the platten lost tourque. So it had a lot of trouble starting the platten to spin. Once it did it would run forever. So this system was the only system on site that was allowed to run 24/7 and the only computer that was on the full backup system for power (battery, genarator and additional methods) I'd be inclined to believe that it was a motor failure probably caused by heat not a case of heads attaching themselves to a platten. James Brian Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
I think the 33mhz bus is the root cause of a lot of problems. Video has improved not because of faster cpu's but because so much of what used to travel on the buss is now done on the card. My hdd may be able to read faster than ever before but it sure doesn't help when even at 66mhz it exceeded buss speed. Your box performs at the slowest speed on the chain and if that's 33mhz that's the choke point.. course all this is IMHO but I think I'm in the ballpark. James On Sun, 19 May 2002 17:41:55 -0500 Tom Brinkman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sunday 19 May 2002 11:48 am, Lyvim Xaphir wrote: I'm still a little leery about maxtor reliability. What's your take on that? LX Can't say, I've only had it a few weeks. First one too, Maxtor's have never been an overclockers favorite. IBM and Quantum always held the crown for 'takes a lickin and keeps on tickin', specially on an off spec PCI bus. Tho I've got a 1.4 Tbird at 1.55, it's all done by upping the multiplier, the FSB is up just a touch (135mz) so the PCI is in spec (135/4). PwrSupply is a Sparkle 300w, provides clean steady 12v 5 V, Vcore and IO too. We'll see ; I think all new drives are a risk, what with the platter density, the high rpms, and these gimmicks (ata/100, 133) to get a touch more out'a 'em, on the old 33mhz pci bus. Bench's look great, real world doesn't reflect it that much. Reliability is sufferin at the expense of marketing and price points, all brands of drives. 'Course then again, backing up to CDr's is fairly cheap ; -- Tom BrinkmanCorpus Christi, Texas Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Charles I've got a 1993 vintage Samsung that's still running strong ... It runs 24/7 and was shipped in the comp from Korea to the US. The story seems to be over all. Don't buy WD Quantum and Fijutsu . the jury is still out. Take your chances on the rest someone is bound to get a bad one. Question is. will they replace it? James On 19 May 2002 12:57:58 -0400 Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, 2002-05-19 at 09:06, Charles A Edwards wrote: I have a 60GB Deskstar that I got in late Dec. It is not the 60GXP, which is the drive that IBM had the QC problem with but is based on either the 75GXP or the 120GXP, most likely the 120GXP. As to the 120GXP itself the following is from the WatchDog column of this months (June/82) issue of MaximumPC Mag IBM got into hot water with consumers when it published a spec sheet with a 'power-on' rating for its popular 120GXP hard drives.The spec suggested that the hard drive could be safely left on for a total of just 333 hours a month. The Dog's investigation has discovered that, despite the published 'power-on' spec, IBM designs and tests its hard drives to withstand 24 hour-a-day use, and honors such use in its warranty. IBM has since redacted its spec sheet to remove the inflammatory power rating. I remember reading this, but I could not remember the source of the information; thanks for posting this ! Currently I have 6 systems running 24/7. Of 15 hds, 9 are IBM Deskstar and 7 are MaxtorPlus. The drives ages range from 5 years to 6 months. In that 5 year span I have suffered only 1 hd failure, a Maxtor, which was replaced. I have owned several maxtors and samsungs, and the worst failures I have ever experienced have been with samsung drives; this was both IDE and SCSI versions. After my last Samsung experience I vowed never to buy another Samsung again. The Maxtors were not as reliable as either the IBM's or the Fujitsu's. I have two Fujitsu's here that are still working after 6 years. If indeed I was forced to make another buying decision other than IBM (which I'm not totally convinced I need to do yet), then I believe I would go back to Fujitsu. I would not go back to either Seagate, or Western Digital; I don't think that the quality is there. Maxtor is still a big maybe. Before that I'd go with either Hitachi or Fujitsu. For now, unless I or someone else really gets burned, I will probably stick with IBM. Especially since you reminded me of the Watchdog article in MaximumPC, Charles. When in the market for a hd if it is on sale or I want 1 today I get the MaxtorPlus retail box (IBM is not available locally). If purchasing on the net I go OEM IBM Deskstar. In my book they both rate as equals in outstanding quality and performance, and with the 1 exception I have yet to be disappointed by either. Charles LX -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
James wrote: I think the 33mhz bus is the root cause of a lot of problems. Video has improved not because of faster cpu's but because so much of what used to travel on the buss is now done on the card. My hdd may be able to read faster than ever before but it sure doesn't help when even at 66mhz it exceeded buss speed. Your box performs at the slowest speed on the chain and if that's 33mhz that's the choke point.. course all this is IMHO but I think I'm in the ballpark. James Actually, we are talking about data rates very differently From/To the attached electronics and disk, the data is _pure serial_ Under any one head there iare 258048 bits of usable data in a rotation... And this rotation occurs in 1/7200th of a second or about .139 ms, so if an entire track is read, we have about 1.86 GBITS/s (that's Gigabits/sec using 10^9) or 1.73Gbits/sec (using 2^30) Now the controller is capable of passing data at what? How is that rated? Is it bytes/sec, words/sec. bits/sec, or just a clock rate that is advertised? The advertising is usually careful NOT to say. In fact it appears to be a clock rate. Now we have to look at the pcide bus The AT Attachment with Packet Interface Revision 6 Draft says there are 16 data bits. What does that mean in raw bit rate? Hmmm lessee, there are many sorts of messages crossing that bus, not all of them data, and to every 512 bytes there is appended a 57-byte CRC packet so let's agree to knock off about 10% for necessary cruft to preserve data integrity--it's a little higher than that but so what? 133MHz (ATAPI-6) less 14Mhz is 119MHzx16bits =1.9GBITS/sec or 1.77Gbits/sec WHOA Until we have 1rpm disks for IDE it looks like we can transfer data a little faster than it can spin on or off the disk But that's OK we can build up the data for a burst in an onboard buffer or seven so that many tasks can be happening apparently simultaneously Now the PCI bus is 32 and the extended PCI bus is 64 bits wide Hmmm the IDE channel is only 16 bits wide so to use the PCI bus to capacity, we need 4 times the clock rate or 4x33 or 132. Sheesh, seems we are at the max that can work with an essentially unbuffered transfer from memory to disk... but of course the buffering is already there for the next of the components that advertises a speed increase. Now look as the fractional nanosecond values of signals for spooling data and recall that once a cylinder boundary is reached (at 63K for single-platter two head disks) we have to talk about stepping the heads, and now we are talking milliseconds, a 10^6 order of magnitude change in data rate. That is why a buffer on the disk electronics is a great idea. The disk is the slowest component. RAID0, RAID4 or RAID5 can make a real difference in the apparent performance of disk transfers by making stepping a less frequent event (with the right chunk size defined, of course.). Civileme Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
civileme wrote: James wrote: I think the 33mhz bus is the root cause of a lot of problems. Video has improved not because of faster cpu's but because so much of what used to travel on the buss is now done on the card. My hdd may be able to read faster than ever before but it sure doesn't help when even at 66mhz it exceeded buss speed. Your box performs at the slowest speed on the chain and if that's 33mhz that's the choke point.. course all this is IMHO but I think I'm in the ballpark. James Actually, we are talking about data rates very differently From/To the attached electronics and disk, the data is _pure serial_ Under any one head there iare 258048 bits of usable data in a rotation... And this rotation occurs in 1/7200th of a second or about .139 ms, so if an entire track is read, we have about 1.86 GBITS/s (that's Gigabits/sec using 10^9) or 1.73Gbits/sec (using 2^30) Now the controller is capable of passing data at what? How is that rated? Is it bytes/sec, words/sec. bits/sec, or just a clock rate that is advertised? The advertising is usually careful NOT to say. In fact it appears to be a clock rate. Now we have to look at the pcide bus The AT Attachment with Packet Interface Revision 6 Draft says there are 16 data bits. What does that mean in raw bit rate? Hmmm lessee, there are many sorts of messages crossing that bus, not all of them data, and to every 512 bytes there is appended a 57-byte CRC packet so let's agree to knock off about 10% for necessary cruft to preserve data integrity--it's a little higher than that but so what? 133MHz (ATAPI-6) less 14Mhz is 119MHzx16bits =1.9GBITS/sec or 1.77Gbits/sec WHOA Until we have 1rpm disks for IDE it looks like we can transfer data a little faster than it can spin on or off the disk But that's OK we can build up the data for a burst in an onboard buffer or seven so that many tasks can be happening apparently simultaneously Now the PCI bus is 32 and the extended PCI bus is 64 bits wide Hmmm the IDE channel is only 16 bits wide so to use the PCI bus to capacity, we need 4 times the clock rate or 4x33 or 132. Sheesh, seems we are at the max that can work with an essentially unbuffered transfer from memory to disk... but of course the buffering is already there for the next of the components that advertises a speed increase. Now look as the fractional nanosecond values of signals for spooling data and recall that once a cylinder boundary is reached (at 63K for single-platter two head disks) we have to talk about stepping the heads, and now we are talking milliseconds, a 10^6 order of magnitude change in data rate. That is why a buffer on the disk electronics is a great idea. The disk is the slowest component. RAID0, RAID4 or RAID5 can make a real difference in the apparent performance of disk transfers by making stepping a less frequent event (with the right chunk size defined, of course.). Civileme Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com ACKS divide the disk rate by 60 :-/ That is rpm not rps. So the disk interface is at least 60 times as fast as the disk!!! Civileme Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On 19 May 2002 14:22:46 -0400, Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For me, IBM was a natural choice until this string of incidents. WD is out of the picture, since they don't correctly follow the ATA spec. That leaves Seagate and Maxtor. Not really; that's sort of a mule blinder perspective. There are more companies out there; like Fujitsu and Hitachi. Fujitsu has sold its desktop HDD business to WD. I'm not sure about Hitachi for desktop drives yet (although they're great in the enterprise arena) -- I would like to wait and see how this 'joint venture' with IBM pans out. But not Samsung. ;) Form what I've seen, they're focused on the 'budget' market (OEMs, etc.). -- Sridhar Dhanapalan I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the _technology_ just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next revolution is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it. -- Linus Torvalds Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sun, 19 May 2002 16:42:04 -0700, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Charles I've got a 1993 vintage Samsung that's still running strong ... It runs 24/7 and was shipped in the comp from Korea to the US. The story seems to be over all. Don't buy WD Quantum and Fijutsu . the jury is still out. Both of those companies are now out of the picture. Quantum is now owned by Maxtor. Fujitsu has sold its desktop HDD division (IIRC to Western Digital), and now focuses entirely on notebook drives. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others. -- Linus Torvalds Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Mon, 20 May 2002 13:03:56 +1000 Sridhar Dhanapalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, 19 May 2002 16:42:04 -0700, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Charles I've got a 1993 vintage Samsung that's still running strong ... It runs 24/7 and was shipped in the comp from Korea to the US. The story seems to be over all. Don't buy WD Quantum and Fijutsu . the jury is still out. Both of those companies are now out of the picture. Quantum is now owned by Maxtor. Fujitsu has sold its desktop HDD division (IIRC to Western Digital), and now focuses entirely on notebook drives. Thought they had but wasn't sure thanks -- Sridhar Dhanapalan I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others. -- Linus Torvalds Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Form what I've seen, they're focused on the 'budget' market (OEMs, etc.). Hmm. Any idea what the set-top boxes might use (tivo, dish network, mp3 players etc.) ? One would seemingly want to have at least as good (if not better) reliability because these drives can easily get more usage (in terms of writes/rewrites) than the typical desktop or server machine. For instance, the drives in embeeded tivo-type devices are routinely re-recording a section of disk with new video as long as there is power to the machine. This is at least true with dish network combo digital video recorders/dish tuner boxes. Sridhar Dhanapalan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
IBM I just bought 4 more from : http://www.mwave.com I currently have at least a dozen modern IBM HDs spinning 24x7 here. I've never had a problem with any of them. They're real fast with or without raid. hdparm reported 35MB/s throughput with Mandrake 8.2, 40 GB IBM 7200RPM, stock kernel and no hdparm settings. This was with a Tyan 2460 and dual Athlon MP1600+. I have had seagate, maxtor, and western digital drives fail. :-( Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: I've been looking at the hard drive scene over the last few months in preparation for purchasing a new system. I've got most of the hardware details sorted out, but there is one area that I'm not quite settled on: hard drives. I am basically looking for an affordable 80GB IDE drive that can deliver fast and reliable (i.e. able to run 24x7) performance. I want to buy two of them so I can make a RAID0 out of them. Of course, they need to play well with Linux, and with any other 'alternate' OS/kernel I throw at it. From what I have read, that rules out Western Digital. Since I prize reliability, that would rule out IBM (IBM is offloading their hard drive business to Hitachi, so that's another minus for them). So the way I see it, only Seagate and Maxtor are still in the race. I checked out storagereview.com and the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (AKA 'Viper') 80GB appears to be neck-and-neck with the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80GB. Any thoughts, people? Thx. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com -- Kevin O'Connor People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun ... The GNU Manifesto - Copyright (C) 1985, 1993 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Sridhar Dhanapalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] sent Saturday, May 18, 2002 6:40 PM: : Any thoughts, people? Thx. Yes. My thought is that it would be nice to know of a motherboard chipset that supports Firewire hard drives, and that is supported by a stable kernel version. If these exist, decisions about which hard drive to choose for an service life would be easier to make. No offense intended to the quite cost-effective IDE drives, of course. I have an 80 GB Maxtor running in the machine that sends this mail. Ken Marcy Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
On Sat, 2002-05-18 at 22:11, KevinO wrote: IBM I heartily second this. I set up a web company on IBM's over three years ago, and they've been running 24/7 ever since. Last week the technical director told me it was one of the best things I ever did; he's sold on the hardware. First time I've heard about the Hitachi thing, tho... I just bought 4 more from : http://www.mwave.com I currently have at least a dozen modern IBM HDs spinning 24x7 here. I've never had a problem with any of them. They're real fast with or without raid. hdparm reported 35MB/s throughput with Mandrake 8.2, 40 GB IBM 7200RPM, stock kernel and no hdparm settings. This was with a Tyan 2460 and dual Athlon MP1600+. I have had seagate, maxtor, and western digital drives fail. :-( Againsame experience here. Not only me, but I think that site Walnut creek ended up ripping out a bunch of barracudas some years back; all brand new, because of the failures. I can't remember what they did, but it wasn't seagate. In any case, it's hard to beat IBM's MTBF. YMMV, of course; but my personal experience is the same as Kevin O'Connor's. LX Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: I've been looking at the hard drive scene over the last few months in preparation for purchasing a new system. I've got most of the hardware details sorted out, but there is one area that I'm not quite settled on: hard drives. I am basically looking for an affordable 80GB IDE drive that can deliver fast and reliable (i.e. able to run 24x7) performance. I want to buy two of them so I can make a RAID0 out of them. Of course, they need to play well with Linux, and with any other 'alternate' OS/kernel I throw at it. From what I have read, that rules out Western Digital. Since I prize reliability, that would rule out IBM (IBM is offloading their hard drive business to Hitachi, so that's another minus for them). So the way I see it, only Seagate and Maxtor are still in the race. I checked out storagereview.com and the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (AKA 'Viper') 80GB appears to be neck-and-neck with the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80GB. Any thoughts, people? Thx. -- °°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°° Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Hard drives: any thoughts?
Have you used any IBM drives made in the past year? Until about a year ago IBM drives were renowned for their reliability, and I used to recommend IBM to all my friends. Since then, they have suffered reliability problems, and the return rate for IBM drives has been high. There was even a class-action lawsuit launched against IBM last year, since so many people's drives failed (I think this was settled out of court). IBM have been first to develop and implement all sorts of new technologies, including glass platters and that 'pixie dust' stuff. It looks as if they're having major teething problems with these new technologies. There was some controversy a few weeks ago when IBM placed warnings on their new drives indicating that they shouldn't be used for more than eight hours per day. If that isn't an indication of poor reliability, then I don't know what is. With all these quality control problems, and IBM's recent financial woes, I am not surprised that they have decided to sell their hard drive unit to Hitachi. If you're wondering where I get all this stuff, it is The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk). For me, IBM was a natural choice until this string of incidents. WD is out of the picture, since they don't correctly follow the ATA spec. That leaves Seagate and Maxtor. On 19 May 2002 00:25:02 -0400, Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, 2002-05-18 at 22:11, KevinO wrote: IBM I heartily second this. I set up a web company on IBM's over three years ago, and they've been running 24/7 ever since. Last week the technical director told me it was one of the best things I ever did; he's sold on the hardware. First time I've heard about the Hitachi thing, tho... I just bought 4 more from : http://www.mwave.com I currently have at least a dozen modern IBM HDs spinning 24x7 here. I've never had a problem with any of them. They're real fast with or without raid. hdparm reported 35MB/s throughput with Mandrake 8.2, 40 GB IBM 7200RPM, stock kernel and no hdparm settings. This was with a Tyan 2460 and dual Athlon MP1600+. I have had seagate, maxtor, and western digital drives fail. :-( Againsame experience here. Not only me, but I think that site Walnut creek ended up ripping out a bunch of barracudas some years back; all brand new, because of the failures. I can't remember what they did, but it wasn't seagate. In any case, it's hard to beat IBM's MTBF. YMMV, of course; but my personal experience is the same as Kevin O'Connor's. LX Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: I've been looking at the hard drive scene over the last few months in preparation for purchasing a new system. I've got most of the hardware details sorted out, but there is one area that I'm not quite settled on: hard drives. I am basically looking for an affordable 80GB IDE drive that can deliver fast and reliable (i.e. able to run 24x7) performance. I want to buy two of them so I can make a RAID0 out of them. Of course, they need to play well with Linux, and with any other 'alternate' OS/kernel I throw at it. From what I have read, that rules out Western Digital. Since I prize reliability, that would rule out IBM (IBM is offloading their hard drive business to Hitachi, so that's another minus for them). So the way I see it, only Seagate and Maxtor are still in the race. I checked out storagereview.com and the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (AKA 'Viper') 80GB appears to be neck-and-neck with the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80GB. Any thoughts, people? Thx. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan We are Microsoft of Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is- Fatal Exception Error in MSBORG32.DLL Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
