What Classic Computer are All About - A Lovers

Allison, I gently disagree with this assertion that ST251 series is good than ST225 series. I got too many dead ST251 series compared to ST225's due to weaker structral design, pushed design by driving steppers too hard byond 40ms average and not as rugged as ST225's. I noticed the relationship between higher stepping rate and terrible high failure rate on many hard drives such as ST251's, Miniscribes and early 40meg western digital drives compared to very slow stepping rate on most drives did last long time byond its goal set by designers. If one wants faster seeking time, go voice coil! I am dreaming wishing that ST251 drive was fitted with voice coil instead of stepper and better motor design...sigh. Those ST225, ST250 are really best consumer's drives and ST251 series might be a mistake at cutting corners well as ST277, ST296 are same design. I wished that segate designed ST251 case more rugged and used internal spindle motor with bearings on outside and one screw on top of cover to stablize the motor from top. Then this ST251's would be possible to be expanded to 100 or 120 size reliably. Whole problem was that design of this ST251 spindle motor is ill-designed to begin with in my opinion: Trying to fit all the coils and one bearing INSIDE that spindle results in weak axle that gets bent easily due to this design and the bearings failure rate on this one is high too. Recently I pulled this ST225 out of dumpter and fixed up the XT with this hd and LLF'ed it. Gave whole thing to poor guy to use vax at college. Still works. I tore down all kinds of drives from old and 3 years old types for post-failure analysis which gave pretty good info for me. Snip! Snip! Tales of positive things about cooling... Actually, all drives old and new benefits from cooling and boards likes the flowing cooling air. We have no choice as many does not have AC so they ran in warm air but if you are careful, enough fans to make hurriance out of it and put a fan or two on monitor as well. My 17" needs two otherwise the HOT transistor will pop again. ARRGgghhh.