[rescue] Hitachi drives..?

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 @ 21:03 -0400, Eric Webb said:

> I really don't want to start a whole thread banging drive interface
> technology or quality, but just looking for any honest experiences
> with Hitachi's IDE drives.  Seem to have longer warranty (3 yrs) than
> other brands.  I think I've heard that their SCSIs are decent, but
> never heard anyone use their IDE.  

Hitachi's IDE drives are nothing like their SCSI drives in terms of
quality.  In the past the Deskstar gained the nickname "Deathstar", and
it was well deserved.

I don't really know about now.

Their Ultrastar SCSI drives are another story.  I've got a few going on
5-6 years of 24/7 operation and the last time I put them on a Mac (the
only place I could find in-depth SCSI tools), no remapping was reported.

Seagate offers 5 year warranties on their IDE and SATA drives now and
you can find them at good prices.

Question of my own:

Anyone know how to get the drive health information off of a SCSI drives
like an Ultrastar or a Fujitsu?  SMART works great for IDE, but I've
had less than good results running smartmontools on SCSI drives.

For example, when my IBM/Hitachi SCSI drives were brand new, smartctl
reported that their spindle motors were failing and that startup times
were slow.  Start up times were perfect, and as for the motors, that was
almost 6 years ago of 24/7 operation.

I know that these SCSI drives can provide full information, because I
have seen the same models on enterprise RAID systems and could see full
statistics on the drives.

Anyone have any ideas on how to check SCSI, or maybe a version of some
SMART tools that works well with SCSI?

Aside:

I have a pair of Mac IIci with their original Quantium Prodrives
installed.  According to the SCSI tools for the old Macs, neither drive
has problems.  The "youngest" of the Macs has 38K power on hours,
and they are almost 16 years old now.  These are the original drives
according to their manifest.

One of the Macs was still in use as of summer 2002, according to notes I
found on the hard drive (they were not wiped before sale).

They both still work fine, though they just collect dust for now.  


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["It's a damn poor mind that can only think
of one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson]