[geeks] Cheap refurb SCSI drives?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Michael Parson wrote:

>> There is a reason why the Hitachi Deskstar was nicknamed "Deathstar".
>
> They had one model that was bad, the 75 gig one, IIRC,

The IBM Deskstar model 75GXP, which ranged in capacity from 15GB to
75GB, I believe.  I had an 75GB model, which I bought as part of a PC
containing an Intel CC820[0] motherboard, and a Soundblaster Live![1].

That experience left me thinking that I didn't want much to do with
building whitebox PCs anymore.

> thought I don't recall what the exact problem was, I never had that
> particular drive.

Oh ho!  The drive would just slowly shred itself.

First you'd notice--that your PC--would start to stutter during I/O
operations.  This would happen during the stage when data was still
recoverable by means of multiple reads.

Then the noises would start.  They'd start out with the drive doing
rapid track-to-track seeks trying to find its place while reading data
(sort of a "nnn-wooga" noise).  Then they'd get a little louder
("NNNNG-scraaaatch").  Then they'd just get sick (like a tin can stuck
in the garbage disposal).

I recovered -most- of my data by booting into linux and doing a dd noerr
to another drive and then running Norton Systemworks on that.  Windows
2000 would just give up, likely because part of the paging space was on
bad areas of the disk.

I went through three, and they all died the same way.  Then I decided
that I'd really rather do business with Western Digital[2].

> I'm a bit of a Seagate biggot, but they've put out some bad drives
> too.  I still buy them though, mostly for their 5 year warranty.

I've likewise had very good luck with Seagate products.


[0] Intel's first "Legacy Free" motherboard.  It dropped ISA slots and
     support for a second floppy drive, yet retained all the other legacy
     garbage from the dustbin of PC history.  The CC80 was special in
     that it let you put PC133 memory on a RAMBUS memory bus by means of
     a "memory translator hub".  These MTH chips were improperly
     shielded from EM interference, and a good number of CC820s could be
     rebooted just from ambient radio waves.  Intel issued a recall, but
     the exchange was a VC820 (the pure-RAMBUS model) and 128MB of
     RAMBUS.  Given that I had 512MB of PC133 in my system, and it was
     2000, I felt it was something of a raw deal.
[1] Whose NT drivers were -horrible-.  Merely changing the active
     SoundFont could cause a BSOD as the driver memory-mapped sound data
     over critical kernel bits.
[2] My 500MB WD Caviar from 1994 still works wonderfully.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke   "The ruler demands gifts, the judge accepts bribes,
Elgin, TX            the powerful dictate what they desire--they all con-
USA                  spire together. The best of them is like a brier, the
                      most upright worse than a thorn hedge." --Micah 7:3-4