Apple external SCSI drives

From: Iggy Drougge <optimus_at_canit.se>
Date: Wed Jan 10 19:10:13 2001

Stan Sieler skrev:

>Iggy asks:

>> Granted, I forgot to mention that there are other SCSI setup utilities,
>> but why in the world would one need to buy a drive /for/ a particular
>> brand of computer? A hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive.

>Although they don't make them now, that wasn't always true for HP drives.
>They claimed to have a (patented?) method of ensuring that if power failed
>during a wite to a drive, no partial sector would be written. (This feature
>as called "sector atomicity".) This was useful on their early/mid-1990s
>PA-RISC systems (HP 3000, HP 9000) that had battery backup for the system
>memory. A short (15 minutes or less) power outage wouldn't kill the system.
>As the bean-counters took over, and dropped the internal batteries (saving a
>small number of $$), HP stopped producing this kind of system (instead, they
>started selling UPS for the entire system) and they stopped making that kind
>of disk drive. Towards the end, they were using Seagate (and Quantum?)
>drives with HP firmware.

>Now, "sector atomicity" is a forgotten phrase in HP, along with other ideas
>like "the HP Way" :(

The file system I'm using right now, SFS (Smart Filesystem), has got sector
atomicity, but instead, it's handled on a filesystem level as opposed to
hardware. That memory backup thing does seem useful, tough.

--
En ligne avec Thor 2.6.
Schont die Sockel, wenn ihr die Denkm?ler st?rzt. Sie k?nnten noch gebraucht
werden.
--- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Received on Wed Jan 10 2001 - 19:10:13 GMT

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