28 Apr
2007
28 Apr
'07
6:01 a.m.
Hi,
I'd tentatively say that if you have a working one, it'll likely keep
working for a while to come.
All the ones that I and several friends bought either failed within the
first couple of months, or failed about 2 months after the guarantee
expired...! If you have one that still works I'd say you've got one of the
good ones. ;-)
BTW The failure in our cases was that the drive failed to spin up
properly/couldn't get up to speed.
And they were
bl**dy unreliable too! :-(
That worries me about the Amiga one.... I did that too... I've sort of given up on SCSI
now for drives
though, simply because the prices for tested/used IDE drives [1]
are so much cheaper than SCSI, and for storage of things like scans
and images I don't *need* the performance.
The reason I've been using SCSI up till now wasn't for the performance of
the drives as such. More because of the fact that the SCSI subsystem is an
intelligent susbystem an puts far fewer demands on Windows than IDE does.
It makes for a far "smoother" running system, I'm constantly irritated by
the little pauses and stutters whenever Windows accesses an IDE drive (this
is true even in the case of these two "high performance" IDE drives I'm
using now).
If it wasn't for the racket my SCSI drives make (I always run at least three
in my configuration, sounds like it's about to take off!!) I'd switch back
to them in a flash.
I'm thinking about investigating SATA as the drives are very cheap now, but
from the little information I've seen thus far,
it's essentially just the
cabling that's changed and the system has to
service them in the same manner
as parallel IDE?
[1] I don't buy new stuff, not for PCs - not when
the price drops so
much for "previous generation"....
Same here, there's far too much of a premium on the latest gear. My attitude
to PC's now is pretty much "So what if it's last year's model, you paid 8
times more for it than I just did....and it still works just as well". :-)
I got really tired of buying the latest bit of gear, only to see the price
halve in the space of a couple of months.
....Unfortunately SCSI drives of 36GB and up don't
seem to be
readily available.
Haven't looked on eBay for a while, but there used to be loads on there
around 18 months ago. They tended to come and go in waves on there, one week
there'd be loads, the next nothing....you can get some real bargains too if
you put in a bit of time searching (last time I got a pair of brand new,
unused, 70 odd GB Seagates for ?25 each, SCA-80 connectors and surprisingly
unpopular despite the adapters only being about ?3).
TTFN - Pete.