21 Jun
2000
21 Jun
'00
6:50 a.m.
Despite thier poor reliability record, I still like
Miniscribe drives.
They sound neat. "Peeep wobble wobble Peep". Western Digital bought what
was left of Miniscribe and produced some really aweful drives when IDE was
beginning to really catch on. I remember stacks of dead WD 40mb 3.5"
drives at a company I worked for in 92/93. We called our 'boneyard' "The
Closet of Shame". The drives were an MFM mech with an IDE board attached.
They used stepper actuators and sucked eggs for reliability. They did
sound neat though.....
I remember 3.5 " WD types that were mounted in a 5.25 bracket. At some
point
in their lives they would generate a lot of bad sectors in the outer cylinders.
(You
would expect the inner cylinders because of the higher bit densities).
To fix the problem: partially unscrew the drive from the bracket (with a
torck-tool)
an fasten it crosswise (like you would fasten a tire). The harddisk would
happely
run another couple of years.
Some supplier threw the bad ones out, and we asked the corpses for socalled
educational
purposes but quikly repaired them instead.
Sipke