[geeks] [JuliaSacks930 at hotmail.com: [janglo] INFO4U: My Ipod Broke My Computer]

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: "Geoffrey S. Mendelson" <gsm at mendelson.com>
" 
" On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 11:34:56AM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
" 
" > MTBF doesn't tell the whole story.  You're assuming that failures are
" > uniformly distributed, in a sense rather like radioactive decay: that
" > the chance of a drive dying during a particular time interval depends
" > on nothing but the size of that interval, whereas in reality it also
" > depends on how far into the drive's service life that interval falls.
" 
" I have a Blue and White Macintosh G3 (original model) that only works
" with older drives. There is a flaw in the IDE controller chip and the
" fastest drive made that works with it is 20gig, anything newer is too
" fast. :-(
" 
" In the year that I've had it, it's been through 4 hard disks. Not because
" of anything wrong with the computer itself, but to get a hard disk, I
" have to find one that's at least five years old and they all have been
" used and then put on a shelf, which decreases the lifetime once they
" get used again. 

i've just acquired a beige g3, so i've studied up on these a bit.

afaik the ide flaw is the same as the u5/u10 [0] - 48-bit addressing,
limiting drives to 128G, though there's supposed to be a clever hack
that involves partitioning larger drives. [1]

have you actually tried a newer drive?  my impression is that newer,
faster drives -are- backwards compatible.

also, there is scsi on the motherboard, though it's directed to the
back panel - it's for connecting all those legacy apple scsi
peripherals.

[0] and apparently models as new as sunblades too.  i guess sun
figures nobody in their right mind would ever need a large drive on
their -desktop-...  or maybe it's the only ide controller they have
a core license for.

[1] it also involves a 3rd-party driver - from sonnet iirc.
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
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adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought