Unusual stuff inside computers

[Diane Bruce]

On Mon, Aug 03, 2015 at 12:33:33PM -0700, Fred Cisin wrote:
> >> I suppose that bad sector maps for ST506/412 hard drives don't count? :-)

Once upon a time, it was the job of the OS to take this badblock count
and remap blocks itself since the drives themselves weren't smart enough.

> 
> On Mon, 3 Aug 2015, ben wrote:
> > If is that bad, time for a new drive.
> In the early days, particularly when actual ST506 and ST412 were common 
> drives, there were VERY VERY few that had no bad tracks.
> 
> In the days of ST506/412 drives every responsible manufacturer included a 
> list of bad tracks.   In the early days, there were plenty.  That was one 
> of several reasons why reputable hard drive manufacturers rounded the 
> capacity down, rather than peddling them with the size stated to half a 
> dozen "significant" digits.  Would you rather have a "10 Meg" drive that 
> formatted out to 10.1Mebibytes, or one that formatted to 10.1Mebibytes 
> that was sold as  being "10.653696 Meg"  ("WOW! This drive is so good that 
> it gave me MORE capacity than it was rated for!")
> 
> 
> For a brief while, Spinrite defaulted to retoring to service any BAD 
> TRACKS that passed Spinrite's tests!  That was based on the assumption 
> that a simple read/write test is surely far more trustworthy than the 
> special hardware and software that the manufacturer used to decide to
> tell you not to trust that track.
> 
> --
> Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com
> 

-- 
- db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db