At 10:45 PM 9/4/2012, you wrote: You should definitely turn on SMART in the BIOS if supported. But that will only report impending failure on boot-up-- I have machines with uptimes exceeding 3 months (6-12 months for my linux machines) so that's no good. There's a smartmon package for both *nix and windows that can tell the drive to self-test every night, and do the long self-test on say Sunday night. SMART tests don't take the drive offline and don't slow down access to the drive (not so's you could tell, anyhow.) 109 . [Fiction] "Tiger gotta hunt. Bird gotta fly. Man gotta sit and wonder why, why, why. Tiger gotta sleep. Bird gotta land. Man gotta tell himself he understand." --Kurt Vonnegut Jr. NEW: a50mhzham at gmail.com ? N9QQB (amateur radio) "HEY YOU" (loud shouting) ? Second Tops (Set Dancing) ? FIND ME ON FACEBOOK 43? 7' 17.2" N by 88? 6' 28.9" W ? Elevation 815' ? Grid Square EN53wc LAN/Telecom Analyst ? Open-source Dude ? Musician ? Registered Linux User 385531

On 09/04/2012 11:36 PM, jimpdavis wrote: My thoughts exactly. :) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

Hi I just picked up an interesting item from WeirdStuff. It seems to be an 8X8 grid with magnetic reed switches, a 68K processor on a proto board. It had a 4 digit LCD display ( that was broken ), 128K bytes of RAM, 128K of ROM, a clock crystal and assorted parts. I'm wondering if it was a prototype for soem game system or maybe some project from some magazine? Does anyone know of such a magazine project? Who ever built it had access to HP parts. The proto board is gold plated and it has 1820-0976 parts on it ( 4015B ). Not the kind of thing you see often. I've not tried to power on yet. I have another similar display but I don't know if the pins are the same. One of the keypad switches is broken and missing parts. I believe the keys marked P, N, K, B, R and Q would indicate the intent was in fact Chess. Dwight

At 11:12 PM 9/4/2012, you wrote: Scusi drives often implement SMART (all my old 4gb, 9gb, and 18gb Compaq fast-wide drives in my old array did) 203 . "Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time - I think I've forgotten this before." --Stephen Wright NEW: a50mhzham at gmail.com ? N9QQB (amateur radio) "HEY YOU" (loud shouting) ? Second Tops (Set Dancing) ? FIND ME ON FACEBOOK 43? 7' 17.2" N by 88? 6' 28.9" W ? Elevation 815' ? Grid Square EN53wc LAN/Telecom Analyst ? Open-source Dude ? Musician ? Registered Linux User 385531

On 7 Sep 2012 at 8:44, Jochen Kunz wrote: So this will diagnose problems with an Seagate ST238N connected to an ST-01 controller? (We are talking classic computers here). --Chuck

Yeah, after reading the ratings on the Seagate consumer drives, it seems they're no better than WD "Green" drives. I'm sticking to WD Blue and Black, as well as Hitachi. Maybe Toshiba will produce something decent in the near future. Seagate's high-end Constellation drives are probably fine, but expect to pay a lot more for those. --David

On Fri, 07 Sep 2012 12:48:37 -0700 "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: OK, I didn't know about the ST238Ns earlynes. So sformat my not be able to read diagnostic information from the drive. But at least it can do extensive random read / write testing. I found that this pushes most flaky drives over the cliff. -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}

On Sep 5, 2012, at 2:51 AM, Tothwolf wrote: "This was a very rare and original hard drive in pristine condition, so we destroyed it." - Dave

On 9/5/2012 9:58 AM, David Riley wrote: I contacted the "artist" and told him he was a moron. We'll see what comes back. I suspect I won't get a certificate of authenticity.

Indeed, I could... That's a perfectluy good soltuion _if the drive is in a PC/XT or similar). It's no good (AFAIK) if the drive is in some other machine which happens to have an ST412-compatible drive interface (looking around me, I see a DEC RAinbow, a PRO35, the external hard disk box for my TRS-80 Model 4, a Xerox Daybreak, a PERQ, a couple of HP drive units, etc all of which fall into that category...) -tony

I cna think of at least 4 categories of machines : 1) Those with an 8 or 16 bit ISA bus. For which there are solutions, like the XT-IDE + CF card 2) Machines that require an ST412-type drive, but can take any geometry, and will use all of it. 3) Machines that have a limited number of differnet geometries they can use, but don't check the drive carefully. If the drive has more heads/cylinders that the machine thinks it should do, the machine doesn't use all the disk space, but it does work 4) Machines that require one of a limited numebr of geometries, and check the drive to make sure it matches. If the selected gheometry says 4 hears, and the drive has 6, the machine will not use said drive. The last are by far the worst to find replacement drives for... -tony

On 5 Sep 2012 at 22:07, Keith Monahan wrote: I was surprised to have a 5GB Seagate ST-1 CF-style microdrive report a SMART "impending failure" when used on an IDE-CF adapter. Do CF cards of the flash variety implement SMART? IOW, will they inform you that the number of available blocks is about to decline? --Chuck

On Wed, 5 Sep 2012, Keith Monahan wrote: SMART is better than nothing, although it too isn't all that reliable of a metric. I've had drives up and die without so much as triggering a SMART warning and I have drives with a great many reallocated sectors still plugging away, some with now well over 100,000 power on hours (with the data they contain backed up, of course). On the other hand, far too many people think SMART is a _reliable_ way to predict drive failure and try to depend on it to "warn" them /before/ their drive fails. This /eventually/ leads to disastrous results since they usually don't bother to back up their files. Of course these tend to be the same types of people who actually think RAID is a valid alternative to keeping backups... To wit: multiple drive failure. One of the key things I've discovered with higher quality drives is that the lower the number of head retractions (and spin down cycles) the longer the drive seems to last. I initially discovered this purely by accident, and this is something you /never/ want to see: === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE [snip] 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 053 053 000 Old_age Always - 20827 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 2131639 ~2.1 million head load/unload cycles... 2131639 load/unload cycles / 20827 power on hours = 102.35 cycles per hour 102.35 cycles per hour / 60 minutes = 1.71 cycles per minute More background: http://tothwolf.livejournal.com/35252.html Ultimately Linux itself wasn't the cause, the hard drive itself just defaulted to a very very dumb power management mode. The default power management mode might not have been as bad with a fat32 or vfat filesystem, but filesystems such as ext2/ext3 constantly want to update atime, so with my drive it turned out the heads would retract/reload roughly 1.71 times per minute.

On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 09:56:08PM +0200, Pontus wrote: Depends, noatime is usually used when one wants to keep writes down as far as possible, e.g. when running from CF/SD cards. When running normal machines with harddisks or SSDs, noatime isn't used, especially since it breaks some assumptions about filesystem semantics. Kind regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

On 9/7/12 9:18 AM, John Foust wrote: 1TB 7200.11s are garbage. I have a stack of them that NEVER worked even after upgrading the firmware. Correct

On Sep 7, 2012, at 12:51 PM, Dan Gahlinger wrote: I should note that, given my previous statement about how I liked the "green" drives that I use them mainly for backup purposes, which means low duty cycle. I can't really comment on their reliability as a general-purpose drive. - Dave

On Sep 7, 2012, at 12:50 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: I suppose it depends. I have yet to find a recent-vintage hard drive that I'll put my trust in, because they've all started failing with little to no notice. I used to rely almost exclusively on Seagate drives, especially back when WD was churning out piles of crap in the late '90s and early '00s, but Seagate's reliability seems to have dropped in the toilet in recent years. Unsurprisingly, it seems to have coincided with their acquisition of Maxtor. I've been happy-ish with recent-make WD "green" drives; they're quiet and don't heat up as much, both of which give me a level of confidence that they're not incurring lots of mechanical or thermal stress (that may be all in my head). They occasionally seem to have serious issues (data corruption type) with some USB<->SATA bridges, but that seems to correlate some with 4k sectors as well. I haven't had one fail yet except under those circumstances, but I'm sure there's a time for everything. - Dave

On 7 September 2012 19:55, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Thus quoting noted SF authoress Pat Cadigan, although I have a feeling she was channelling Jerry Pournelle. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

At 11:50 AM 9/7/2012, Chuck Guzis wrote: Prudent, I'd say. The other day I was surprised to see that WD's enterprise-class 500 GB drives with better specs and a five-year warranty were only roughly twice the price of consumer drives (~$70 vs. ~$120) - John