Date : Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:23:57 +0100
From : philpem@... (Philip Pemberton)
Subject: OT Only Connect
Rick Murray wrote:
> "Kalok Octagon"??? Sounds like it hails from old-sort-of-Soviet (in
> those days) eastern europe.
They were based in California, and the drives were made in South Korea
and the Philippines, if memory serves. Their claim to fame was that they
allegedly figured out how to eliminate about half the parts that
typically went into a 3.5" HDD... so that'd be basically all the support
rails and shock absorbers, and probably the head loading ramp / landing
zone assembly...
>> I started off with a Spectrum +2A, then got a 486 PC a bit later on. I
>> seem to recall being pretty good at Lemmings.. :)
>
> Chuckie Egg was my favourite. I used to occupy myself when my friends
> were trying to get that crappy old spectrum with the rainbow coloured
> keys to load Jet Set Willy.
Heh. R TAPE LOADING ERROR was always an annoyance.
> On the other hand, what would be the point of a 200Gb drive hooked to a
> Beeb? You bcould put on a copy of every Beeb thing ever created, and
> barely make a noticable dent in the free space reading...
Heh. The only reason I'm using the CFS425 on the Beeb and not the
Fushitsu is because the Fu has serious bearing whine. Not bad for a
~20-year-old drive I ripped out of a 386, but it's still junk. The IBM
works OK (i.e. spins and passes the BAT tests), but isn't picked up by
the Beeb. The CFS is just quiet enough (after being covered in
books/papers/foam/junk) to not annoy the heck out of me. One of these
days I'll buy a CF->IDE adapter and bolt my 256MB CF card onto the Beeb
instead...
Speaking of Fujitsu, there's only ONE Fujitsu-branded product I own that
works respectably well: a pair of 10W hi-fi speakers that are plugged
into my amplifier. A family friend bought a new ICL PC and they managed
to send her the wrong speakers... they were going to go in the bin, and
I said something to the effect of "Hmm, that looks like the connector on
the back of my hi-fi". Said speakers ended up in the boot of the car
after that. Something about me being able to put them to some use other
than paperweights or dust-collectors :)
Every single Fujitsu drive I've used has had something wrong with it
(usually the controller boards die horribly) and all the Fujitsu PCs
I've worked on have been built just well enough to last out the 12-month
guarantee. Toshiba kit is about the same (their laptops are incredibly
badly built!) and Samsung should stick to making microwave ovens...
I used to like the Seagate drives until they tightened up their RMA
policy. Now you pretty much have to pay ?20 for a "Seagate approved"
cardboard box and packing foam, or risk having them deny your RMA... I
am not paying ?20 for a box and foam... The distributor were a lot more
friendly. "It's dead? OK, about half a dozen layers of bubble-wrap, then
find a nice thick-walled cardboard box to put it in. Send it Recorded
first-class, our address is >X<."
My current flavour-of-the-month are the WesternDigital drives -- a
Caviar-GP (aka Greenpower) series for the PVR (they're quiet), and two
RE2 "enterprise class" SATA drives for the uber-desktop. I reserve the
right to change my opinion about these "as and when", but for now they
seem pretty good. They're certainly reliable, and quiet enough that
they're basically inaudible (unless you're sitting in an anechoic chamber).
--
Phil.
philpem@...
http://www.philpem.me.uk/