On Wed, Jul 02, 2008 at 08:13:00PM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote: I have a no-name USB pocket drive (Tone?) with me that has an OEM ST1 inside (it explicitly does not provide 8-bit mode, but works fine in 16-bit mode according to the Seagate data sheets). It was given to me just over a year ago and sees weekly usage for hauling around a variety of files from machine to machine. I have had no problems with it, but neither have I beaten the hell out of it (except to operate it above 10000'). How cheap are the refurbs? I don't know what mine cost last year - it was a going-away present from my summer job back home between seasons. If they were cheap enough, I might like to pick up a few. I also have a 340MB IBM Microdrive, but I think that was well under $10 ST1, but the ST1 was new when I got it and the IBM was not. Neither have failed as of yet. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 3-Jul-2008 at 03:49 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -81.0 F (-62.8 C) Windchill -120.8 F (-84.9 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 11.3 kts Grid 40 Barometer 681.6 mb (10568 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

Well, I don't know about "extensive", but my favourite laptop has CF as the only disk-like interface it has (it also has a PCMCIA slot, but that is rather necessary for the network, as it's old enough to have no built-in network). I have two microdrives, an IBM "340MB" (actually 342MB, the only instance I can think of where anything disk-like has actually had _more_ space than it's marked as having) and a Seagate "8.0GB" which is actually 7.45+G; I normally use the Seagate, as 340M is too small for me to fit comfortably in (340M isn't even big enough to hold a source tree). The Seagate runs a little hot (it's marked "CompactFlash Photo Hard Drive", so it's presumably designed for the low duty cycle experienced in use as a digital camera photo holder). On a handful of occasions, when I've left the machine doing a lengthy build (which is necessarily disk-intensive), the disk has fallen over and I've had to pull it out and reboot to recover. It's never needed more than that, though. The Seagate may be one of your "ST1 models"; when I pop it in a PCMCIA adapter and plug it in, I see the "ST1" string in the resulting text: wdc2 at pcmcia1 function 0: <SEAGATE, ST1> pcic0: port 0x400-0x40f wdc2: i/o mapped mode pcmcia1: card irq 5 atabus3 at wdc2 channel 0 wd2 at atabus3 drive 0: <ST68022CF> wd2: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA addressing wd2: 7629 MB, 15501 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 15625008 sectors wd2: drive supports PIO mode 4 /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B