World's Crappiest Drives (was Re: A&J Microdrive)

From: r. 'bear' stricklin <red_at_bears.org>
Date: Wed Dec 6 11:54:06 2000

On Tue, 5 Dec 2000 THETechnoid_at_home.com wrote:

> Miniscribe 3650

I think I had one of these. 3.5" HH 40 MB MFM disk? ca. 60ms seek
times? Loudest drive I've ever heard.

How about the Exabyte 8200? Famous for forgetting they had tapes in them
and refusing to eject. Not only that, but it was commonly referred to as
the 'write once, read never' backup media.

We won't talk about the TK50.

I will, however, nominate any hard disk Micropolis made which was in a
smaller form factor than 5.25" FH. Garbage.

Oh, and the Seagate Barracudas. Ran so fast they burned themselves up. At
one point we had a 50% DOA rate on these drives. The remaining ones
usually fried inside of 30 days. We never did figure out how Seagate
managed to come up with their 500k-hour MTBF on these disks. The Hawks
were nearly as bad.

The ST51080N, though.. super-nice. Small, cool, quiet, reasonably
quick. Where did that one come from? A diamond amongst dung. That drive
was physically unique in Seagate's lineup, as far as I could ever tell. It
certainly wasn't for not having looked.

> How about a vote on the BEST disk drives ever?

The IBM UltraStar ES.

> Bulletproof drives:
> Seagate St225,251, and 4096 interface version notwithstanding

Nah, I had a 4096N which had stiction. It took progressively stronger
shocks to the chassis to get it to spin up, until finally I was beating it
with a shoe. That situation ultimately ended in a head crash and data
loss.


        r.
Received on Wed Dec 06 2000 - 11:54:06 GMT