On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, Bill Sudbrink wrote: I don't know what that is but I don't like the sound of it. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

Out of my 7 30GB and 60GB Deskstars, two died within 2 years. Luckily (?) IBM stands by its warranty and you only need go to their website and do an RMA to get replacements. Of course you have to send in the old one(s), so back up a.s.a.p.!

www.storagereview.com is an excellent resource for comparing "modern" drives. People can contribute their user experience and it's added to the drive reliability database. At one point there was even talk about a class action suit against IBM about the 60GXP and 75GXP. I have a 45GB 75GXP that has been flawless, yet a friend of mine who is at IT manager has reported 55% failure rate across several hundred drives. Thermal recalibration was on older drives. Periodically, the electronics would seek to home and perform a calibration read, then seek to outermost cylinder and perform a read. The head positioning was then recalculated to allow for platter tolerances caused by thermal issues. This was why a few years ago some drives were sold as "AV" or Audio Visual drives. They did not have this recalibration procedure, which allowed them to be used for streaming video. Obviously having the drive go away for 2 or 3 seconds doing a recalibration perdiodically would wreak havoc when you were dealing with highbandwidth streams. Also, drives had much smaller buffers (128K, 256K) rather than the pretty much standard 2MB buffers todays drivers had. Now, on XP. I get really tired of hearing people bash Windows. Running an OS that suits ones needs is the thing to do. In my mind, XP is technically superior to NT and Win2K, although I *personally* won't run XP because of the licensing issues, and MSs intent. For me, Win2K will most likely be the end of the line for Windows, for me, unless Microsoft and me has a serious Comes To Jesus meeting, where I'm Jesus. I'm not about to let some miserable OS manufacturer impose their idea of Digital Rights Management on my life. And since I'm a big believer in voting with your dollars, I'll vote myself all the way over to Linux (I run about 40% Windows, 40% Linux distros, and 20% odd-others, like Solaris and Mac OSX. I don't do any production work on the classic computers, so I don't count them among my mix.) So if XP works for you, and your comfortable with MSs idea of the future, no one should be judging you on that. To use a politically correct statement --John On Saturday 23 November 2002 07:54, Sellam Ismail wrote: