23 Feb
2007
23 Feb
'07
8:51 p.m.
Mr Ian Primus wrote:
Recently, an accquaintaince was cleaning up his house
and came upon some old hardware, and asked - do I want
some old hard disks? Sure! He gave me a pair of old
Avid external 9 gig hard drives. Basically just 9 gig
5 1/4" FH Micropolis 50 pin SCSI drives in little-ish
external boxes. Perfect for some of these old boxen I
run around here. Anyway, I decided to hook them up
tonight. I cabled them up to an old PC, powered
everything on, and the SCSI card saw both disks. I
left the machine run while I went in the next room to
burn a Debian netinst CD. Five minutes later... what's
that smell? I went in the next room, now slightly hazy
and full of that acrid 'burnt electronics' smell. I
hit the switch on the power strip and started smelling
things looking for the source. Old 14" DigiView
monitor? - no... Old Compaq desktop PC? - no... Avid
external 9 gig SCSI hard drive? - <cough>.. yes
<gasp>.
...
Computers never cease to amaze me.
-Ian
If these are indeed 9G 5.25" FH Micropolis drives... run, run
very fast and far away from them.... (or better yet, throw them
as far as you can.... if possible... farther)... you will regret it
otherwise.
I've only had experience with one of those drives... that was
enough... and I've never touched another after I heard all the
horror stories.
The fact you have one or more that even seem to work is a
miracle (but your luck will run out).
It is too bad too... I liked Micropolis till that point. I especially
liked the old 5.25" FH 600M SCSI 'bricks'. They are reliable.
I've had a couple of 2G and 4G SCSI 3.5" Micropolis drives...
I have put much time on them... but they seem to work OK.
(I think the 4G is a Tomahawk... but I seem to recall hearing
bad stories about some (if not all) of those too).
My all time favorite for drives in the 9G and up catagory
(in 3.5 inch form factor) is quantum.... I've had a lot of those...
and I've only eve had one failure. And I probably accidentally
zapped it with static....
Now everything is pretty much Seagate, Western Digital, and
Hitachi.... I pretty much go with Seagate now.
-- Curt