Date   : Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:51:04 +0100
From   : philpem@... (Philip Pemberton)
Subject: OT Only Connect

Rick Murray wrote:
> I have a Miniscribe! :-)

You poor sod.

:)

> In use? Let's say it's the only SCSI harddisc I've ever come across that 
> would probably make my FileStore run SLOWER, had it been possible to 
> install it.

Heh.

> --8<--------
> These products are ideal for ruggedized applications and specially
> suited where compact size, lightweight, high storage capacity, and
> reliability is required.
> --8<--------

ROFLMAO!
The Kalok Octagon series were about as "rugged" as extremely thinly 
sliced Tesco Value brand Cheddar. Or perhaps soggy Ryvita. Which one's 
more likely to disintegrate if you look at it wrong? :)


 >> "The drive may be mounted in any attitude!"

I think the drive has enough attitude of its own...

More at 
<http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/kalok/KL-330-33MB-3-5-HH-RLL-ST412.html>...
(Which looks to me like a typed-in or OCR'd version of the Kalok OEM 
manual).


> Oh, so it was an actuator, a head, and a platter rattling around with 
> little else useful?!?

Pretty much. The casing was shockingly thin, too.

> They got rid of shock absorbers? I bet it'd be fun to listen to Win32 
> swapping off one of those!

RATTA-TATTA-TAAAAAAAT-RATTA-TAAAAAAAAAT!

Go watch one of those old black-and-white movies -- the sort that 
feature gangsters shooting Tommy guns. That's the sound the little 
buggers make!

The ultimate award for cheapness in HDD manufacture has to go to Maxtor, 
though. The N40P (DiamondMax +8) didn't have a proper metal lid and 
rubber seal... it had a tinfoil lid and a glue seal. No points for 
guessing what happened when that seal rubbed against the sides of the 
hard drive mount in a PC case.

>> Heh. R TAPE LOADING ERROR was always an annoyance.
> 
> What, this?
>    http://www.rtapeloadingerror.com/
> 
> :-)

No, it NEVER bailed out THAT quickly.

You always got RTLEs about 5 seconds before the game was due to finish 
loading.

'Course there's always the BBC Micro equivalent:
   Disc error 08 at 19:1
And who could forget:
   Cat full
(But I don't have a cat!)

> The only computer I've ever been happy leaving on overnight is Aiko, 
> which is virtually silent.

I don't leave any of my "retro" gear on for more than a couple of hours 
at a time... my home server (Wolf, the 1U rack-mount Atom N270 box) is 
the only one that stays on. Mainly because I like to wake up and then 
check my email while I'm eating breakfast. Not easy to do when you're 
waiting 25 minutes for fsck to run.

> I'm wary of things that aren't Intel chips that feel a need to run that 
> hot...

Indeed. No electrical device (barring a heater, soldering iron, oven or 
similar) should be designed to operate above ~50 Celsius. If it's 
getting hotter than that, something's wrong.

> They'd die, they really would. My 250Gb Deskstar drive arrived in a 
> large box, bigger than a shoebox. Inside was the harddisc in a sealed 
> antistatic bag, and a small handful of shredded cardboard.
> THAT WAS IT.
> 
> For reference:
>    1. The supplier was Grosbill ( www.grosbill.fr )
>    2. The drive verified okay and has worked just fine since

Most of the IBM Deskstars actually weren't too bad. The 60GXP and 75GXP 
series, OTOH, and most of the TravelStar series from that time period 
were utter crap. Those things LOVED to headcrash, and if they didn't 
headcrash, at some point in their lives they'd crap all over the NVRAM. 
First power-cycle after the NVRAM got nuked, they'd start overwriting 
random disk sectors, or the Service Zone. Once that happened, you were 
basically screwed.

IBM stuck their heads in the sand when confronted

> Maybe the over-the-top box&foam says a lot about Seagate's thoughts on 
> their drive?

See above.

> I'm sure I read on one drive that, when off, it could withstand an 
> impact of 300G? That can't be right, surely? 300G? Doesn't that mean I 
> could lob it at a concrete floor and expect it to work afterwards?

That'll be an aluminium-platter drive with a shock-absorber then. No way 
glass platters would survive that kind of abuse.

>> 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<."
> 
> What, no anti-static baggie?

Yeah, it went in an anti-static baggie...

>> My current flavour-of-the-month are the WesternDigital drives
> 
> How d'you rate SSDs?

About the same as most HDDs. There's always something that can go wrong, 
and usually when that happens the drive will completely pack in (as 
opposed to, say, dropping back to a read-only mode that still allows you 
to recover your data).

-- 
Phil.
philpem@...          
http://www.philpem.me.uk/