Now hard drives too. Re: Modern floppy disk question...

Joe wrote: Ain't no such thing. What used to be IBM's disk drive business is now Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (www.hgst.com), and they certainly do not sell drives made by Fujitsu, since they make their own. Like every brand, IBM drives had their own share of problems at times. As one of my friends observes, you should avoid drive manufacturers with an "m" in the in the name, and contrary to appearances "Seagate" does contain an "m". :-) The reality is that good or bad experiences with one generation of drives earlier or later generations from the same manufacturer. Most of the current disk drive manufacturers make reasonably good products most of the time, but there are occasional exceptions. The only way to really trust IDE drives is to run them with mirroring or RAID 5. Otherwise, you'd best to frequent backups. Which is a good idea even with mirroring or RAID. Also note that IDE drives really do NOT have the same quality level as SCSI/FC/SAS etc. This is not due to the interface, but due to actual mechanical differences in how the drives are engineered and manufactured. There is nothing inherent in the host interface that dictates this; rather it is due to the market that the drives target. SCSI etc. are targetted at high-reliability applications where cost is not the overriding concern, while IDE drives are targetted at the cost-is-everything consumer market. (There exist some "upscale" IDE drives, which are better than the cheapest ones, but they're still not in the same league as SCSI etc.) For an interesting paper that explains some of the technical details on how the "enterprise" drives differ from "consumer" drives, see the paper "More than an interface - SCSI vs. ATA" by Seagate Research: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~riedel/papers/SCSIvsATA.abstract.html Eric