10 Jan
2001
10 Jan
'01
2:10 p.m.
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