www.storagereview.com is an excellent resource for comparing "modern" drives.
People can contribute their user experience and it's added to the drive
reliability database.
At one point there was even talk about a class action suit against IBM about
the 60GXP and 75GXP. I have a 45GB 75GXP that has been flawless, yet a
friend of mine who is at IT manager has reported 55% failure rate across
several hundred drives.
Thermal recalibration was on older drives. Periodically, the electronics
would seek to home and perform a calibration read, then seek to outermost
cylinder and perform a read. The head positioning was then recalculated to
allow for platter tolerances caused by thermal issues. This was why a few
years ago some drives were sold as "AV" or Audio Visual drives. They did not
have this recalibration procedure, which allowed them to be used for
streaming video. Obviously having the drive go away for 2 or 3 seconds doing
a recalibration perdiodically would wreak havoc when you were dealing with
highbandwidth streams. Also, drives had much smaller buffers (128K, 256K)
rather than the pretty much standard 2MB buffers todays drivers had.
Now, on XP. I get really tired of hearing people bash Windows. Running an
OS that suits ones needs is the thing to do. In my mind, XP is technically
superior to NT and Win2K, although I *personally* won't run XP because of the
licensing issues, and MSs intent. For me, Win2K will most likely be the end
of the line for Windows, for me, unless Microsoft and me has a serious Comes
To Jesus meeting, where I'm Jesus. I'm not about to let some miserable OS
manufacturer impose their idea of Digital Rights Management on my life. And
since I'm a big believer in voting with your dollars, I'll vote myself all
the way over to Linux (I run about 40% Windows, 40% Linux distros, and 20%
odd-others, like Solaris and Mac OSX. I don't do any production work on the
classic computers, so I don't count them among my mix.)
So if XP works for you, and your comfortable with MSs idea of the future, no
one should be judging you on that. To use a politically correct statement
from Southpark, it's your "life choice". Whatever works, eh?
--John
On Saturday 23 November 2002 07:54, Sellam Ismail wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, J.C.Wren wrote:
> > If it's none of the above, I'm curious what OS you're running,
> > simply because it's not THAT many that are capable of support 60GB IDE
> > drives.
>
> XP (cowers in embarassment).
>
> I looked at the properties of the drive and this string shows up:
>
> IC35L060AVVA07-0
>
> A Google search later and it's an IBM Deskstar 60GXP.
>
> Nothing on IBM's site indicates any firmware upgrades or problems with the
> drive.
>
> Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer
> Festival
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>--- International Man of Intrigue and Danger
> http://www.vintage.org
>
> * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com
> *
Received on Sat Nov 23 2002 - 17:20:01 GMT