In a message dated 11/23/2002 3:49:53 PM Eastern Standard Time, foo(a)siconic.com writes: << > Try googling for "IBM Deathstar" (that is NOT a typo). The Deskstars are Oh shit. It's been doing that for months now. I've had it for a little less than a year. Gawd damn Fry's specials. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival Normally IBM drives are pretty good. The issue was about some particular model that was rated for xxxx hours of constant usage or something like that. Check slashdot archives for discussion on it. If it's a SMART drive, you have the program that can query the drive, it might be able to tell you if anything bad is happening. I've still got IBM SCSI drives from 8-10 years ago still going strong with that soft tick-tick-tick recalibrate noise happening every once in a while. The 400 meg ones are so quiet you can't tell when they doing R/W operations. -- Antique Computer Virtual Museum www.nothingtodo.org