# What harddisk have you had die on you, which worked fine?

## pmjdebruijn

Hi,

I would really like to know what harddrives you had die on you, and which ones have worked fine for you...

Please include brand, model, size, speed, cache... 

It would be nice if you would also include how long a drive has lasted if it died.

For me I've had no drive die on me yet... Even my old 286 laptop's 40mb SCSI drive still works, with some bad sectors though...

Please don't bash any brand, I just want to know the facts!

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## pmjdebruijn

I hope an operator makes this thread sticky!

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## Guezz-Who

I think I've been really lucky with my harddrives since I've only lost two drives the last 5-6 years. 

One was a seagate medalist 1.2 gb ST21276A, it died after some years of usage, luckilly it gave me a warning in time (strange noices) so i managed to take a backup.

The other one was a (surprise) IBM.. I've tried to avoid IBM drives coz they have a really bad reputation, but this one was in my laptop (dell inspiron 8200), didn't even know it was a ibm untill i opened it to replace it. Well, anyway.. IBM Travelstar 40 gb..

The rest of my drives are mostly Western Digital (80 and 120 gb), have 5 of them in usage now. Never lost a WDC drive even if they are in use 24/7 ..  :Smile: 

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## krazo

A Fujitsu died on me.. so I have never bought drives from them since then. It was a 4.1gb model at the time... wow those were the days..

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## Chickpea

I have only had one drive die on me and it too was the segate medalist as posted by Guezz-Who.  It was long time ago and unfortunately, my drive didnt give me any warning signs.

I am in the market right now for a new hard drive.  Are there any brands that are better than another?

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## Guezz-Who

Well, I really like the 8 mb cache versions of Western Digital, they rock  :Smile: 

But I've heard good things about Samsung drives too, if you want a really quiet drive (but maybe not as fast as a WDC) a Samsung might be a good choice..

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## kozmic

Western Digital with 8mb catch, i couldnt live without them. :)

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## Anacific

IBM Deskstar just died on me 2 days ago. Not that I didn't expect it to, considering that they're one of the most horrible HDs ever released.

Right now I have Western Digital 80GB w/ 8mb cache. However, LiveCD doesn't seem to work with UDMA enabled (I have to use ide=nodma to be able to even boot) while WinXP works perfectly. Strange but I'll see how it goes.

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## taskara

back in the old days maxtor SUCKED big time.

but they seem pretty good now.

seagate have always been pretty good except early barracudas which got too hot and died.

IBM deskstars were good for a little while but then they were dying left front and centre.

never had a faulty WD

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## Chickpea

Hmmm.  the local store around here (an actuall good computer parts store)  sells Western Digital and the Seagate (Maxtor and Hitatchi too) and I had a hard time deciding between the two as I am under the impression that Seagates are more quiet.

C

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## Anacific

 *Chickpea wrote:*   

> I am under the impression that Seagates are more quiet.

 

That's what people say. However, I can't even hear my WD and my case is open.

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## taskara

seagate sata drives are quite noisy.. they sound like scsi disks when they write.

don't know what WD sata disks sound like

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## Malakin

 *Quote:*   

> But I've heard good things about Samsung drives too, if you want a really quiet drive (but maybe not as fast as a WDC) a Samsung might be a good choice..

 Samsung's are extremely slow, they're much slower then maxtor/ibm/seagate or WD. If you want a quiet drive buy a Seagate Barracuda V.

http://storagereview.com/articles/200202/20020218SP8004_3.html

Note that since this review was done all manufacturers have updated models except for Samsung so Samsung is actually much further behind. Samsung has a 3 year warranty with all their drives, it's the one good thing they have going for them.

 *Quote:*   

> That's what people say. However, I can't even hear my WD and my case is open.

 You must have some noisy fans or something, every WD I've sold has bearing whine although it's not as loud as the pre-FDB Maxtor models.

If you want a quiet drive the quietest is still the Seagate Barracuda V although the Maxtor diamondmax plus 9 isn't far behind. Just don't buy a Western Digital, they're still not using fluid dynamic bearings yet.

http://storagereview.com/articles/200306/20030615ST3160023A_6.html

Personally I'd go with a Seagate. I hated the pre-FDB Maxtor drives but the newer ones seem fairly good so Maxtor would be my 2nd pick.

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## elliptical_boy

 *Quote:*   

> The other one was a (surprise) IBM.. I've tried to avoid IBM drives coz they have a really bad reputation, but this one was in my laptop (dell inspiron 8200), didn't even know it was a ibm untill i opened it to replace it. Well, anyway.. IBM Travelstar 40 gb..

 

I lost a 48 GB IBM Travelstar 5400 rpm (in my Dell Inspiron 8100) about three weeks ago after 22 months of very hard use, not to mention riding in my bicycle bags on the (10 km) way to work for the past year...  I replaced it with a 60 GB IBM/Hitachi Travelstar 4800 rpm drive, but have already encoutered a nasty bad sector.

Except for the fact that I haven't found a 2.5" drive with more than 30 or 40 GB that wasn't made by IBM/Hitachi, I'll never buy a Travelstar again.  Unfortunately, the size of astronomical images these days requires huge storage, so I'm kinda stuck with these POSes.  :Mad: 

I have learned the hard lesson of proper backups (daily, if possible)!  :Sad: 

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## carbon

looks like IBM harddrives suck ess   :Laughing: 

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## BxBoy

I had a WD 80 GB that just died out me. I went out and got a Maxtor 160 GB (7200 w/ 8 MB cache). So far so good..

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## Guezz-Who

 *carbon wrote:*   

> looks like IBM harddrives suck ess  

 

Hehe, yes, maybe not that much now, but definitely before (their 60 GXP series).. A friend of mine had 3x 45 gb ibm drives in RAID5.. One of them broke, but it wasn't that dangerous because he had RAID.. but then, within a week after the first disk crashed he lost another one, before he could replace the first drive and rebuild the RAID, talk about bad luck  :Confused: 

I guess he won't buy IBM drives again  :Smile: 

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## agent_jdh

Heh, a topic close to my heart, I used to qualify IDE drives for a large OEM.

Recent IBM drives are probably OK now, the old Deathstar drives were a nightmare though.

Fujitsu have had a few problems recently, but their drives are generally OK.

The new WDs certainly look fast but their long-term reliability is unproven, they've made a comeback though, a couple of years ago everyone expected WD to be bought out a la Quantum.

Maxtor drives are generally solid (and have benefitted from Quantum engineering input), as well as being quick and quiet.

If I had to part with my own money for a new IDE HDD tomorrow though, I'd get a Seagate.  Seagate _tend_ to be a couple of generations ahead of most other manufacturers when it comes to the basic HDD tech and are prime innovators in the industry.  They make fast, quiet, reliable drives (and no, I don't work for them).

One thing that is a bummer though is that the industry has moved to one year warranties on IDE drives rather than three year ones; HDD's are treated by OEMs like any other commodity now, but for Joe User a dead HDD is much more of a pain than a dead processor.

It is incredible though how robust drives are these days, although it is still one area where IDE lags SCSI - SCSI drives are generally manufactured to a higher standard (again this is OEM driven) and should prove less troublesome.

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## Kesereti

Maybe I'm just lucky....but...I've had two 30GB IBM Deskstar drives for years, they're on 24hrs a day, and neither has ever given me any problems whatsoever... =P

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## agent_jdh

 *Kesereti wrote:*   

> Maybe I'm just lucky....but...I've had two 30GB IBM Deskstar drives for years, they're on 24hrs a day, and neither has ever given me any problems whatsoever... =P

 

What sort of configuration are they in?  There was some speculation the Deathstar drive problems were down to overheating (this was when cheap IDE RAID setups just became popular, people were fitting multiple drives into boxes and not cooling them properly or ensuring their power supply could handle the load of multiple HDD's spinning up simultaneously).

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## slais-sysweb

I had a Compaq (386 circa 1990) with a Conner drive that died after 7 years, but the other Conner drive in that machine (my firewall for the past 3 years)  was working fine when the machines power supply died last month. I would have kept the drive but 200MB is a bit small these days. Well they dont make them likevthat any more.

I had a Quantum Atlas II 4.3GB UW-SCSI that died the very day after the Five year warrant expired. I have a Apple/Quantum 80mb SCSI from 1990 still providing MacOS9 and BootX to my Gentoo-ppc box. And two Quantum/Apple 4.3GB SCSI-2 circa 1997 in a Gentoo-x86 with RAID box though one of those has a few bad blocks and should be replaced soon.

I have a lot of IBM SCSI drives of 4.3, 9.1 and 18GB, and so far no failures even though some are from the notorious Hungarian factory.

Of IDE drives I have failures of Maxtor 6.3 GB fitted in Dells, but they are work machines and can't answer for how they may have been treated.

I have three Seagate Barracuda ATA100 drives (60 and 80GB but they are two new to give a verdict.

Conclusions: drives last longer if you keep the machine always on and dont move it about too much. Drives don't last as long as they used to.

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## agent_jdh

 *slais-sysweb wrote:*   

> I had a Compaq (386 circa 1990) with a Conner drive that died after 7 years, but the other Conner drive in that machine (my firewall for the past 3 years)  was working fine when the machines power supply died last month. I would have kept the drive but 200MB is a bit small these days. Well they dont make them likevthat any more.
> 
> I had a Quantum Atlas II 4.3GB UW-SCSI that died the very day after the Five year warrant expired. I have a Apple/Quantum 80mb SCSI from 1990 still providing MacOS9 and BootX to my Gentoo-ppc box. And two Quantum/Apple 4.3GB SCSI-2 circa 1997 in a Gentoo-x86 with RAID box though one of those has a few bad blocks and should be replaced soon.
> 
> I have a lot of IBM SCSI drives of 4.3, 9.1 and 18GB, and so far no failures even though some are from the notorious Hungarian factory.
> ...

 

Ahhh, Connor *reminisces*

I'm not sure about drives not lasting as long as they used to - any old drive still running today was basically a real good one - for every one still going there will be loads that are in landfill sites somewhere.  In five years' time there will probably be a larger percentage of todays drives still operational.

You've hit on one thing though - people don't seem to realise how fragile an HDD really is, and are quite happy to e.g. shift machines around desks while the HDD is spinning, or generally handle them badly, which accounts for far more HDD issues than any manufacturing defects.

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## Kesereti

 *agent_jdh wrote:*   

>  *Kesereti wrote:*   Maybe I'm just lucky....but...I've had two 30GB IBM Deskstar drives for years, they're on 24hrs a day, and neither has ever given me any problems whatsoever... =P 
> 
> What sort of configuration are they in?  There was some speculation the Deathstar drive problems were down to overheating (this was when cheap IDE RAID setups just became popular, people were fitting multiple drives into boxes and not cooling them properly or ensuring their power supply could handle the load of multiple HDD's spinning up simultaneously).

 

Umm...they're set up as masters on their own IDE channels...physically, they're one space apart from each other in my case, no special hard drive fans or anything...350W power supply, other things drawing power are the MB/CPU (Athlon 1GHz), CD-ROM drive, Audigy Live!Drive, and...umm...the power LED =P

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## agent_jdh

 *Kesereti wrote:*   

>  *agent_jdh wrote:*    *Kesereti wrote:*   Maybe I'm just lucky....but...I've had two 30GB IBM Deskstar drives for years, they're on 24hrs a day, and neither has ever given me any problems whatsoever... =P 
> 
> What sort of configuration are they in?  There was some speculation the Deathstar drive problems were down to overheating (this was when cheap IDE RAID setups just became popular, people were fitting multiple drives into boxes and not cooling them properly or ensuring their power supply could handle the load of multiple HDD's spinning up simultaneously). 
> 
> Umm...they're set up as masters on their own IDE channels...physically, they're one space apart from each other in my case, no special hard drive fans or anything...350W power supply, other things drawing power are the MB/CPU (Athlon 1GHz), CD-ROM drive, Audigy Live!Drive, and...umm...the power LED =P

 

It's good that you've got a space between the drives - I get the impression folks were just piling as many drives as possible into whatever spaces were there and raid-ing them up.  Are they 5400 or 7200 rpm?  Some active cooling would probably be a good idea if they're 7200, although maybe your case is well ventilated.

One question, do you have another IDE channel, or is your cdr-rom slaved to one of the HDDs?  It's better not to mix and match ATA (eg HDD) and ATAPI (eg cdrom) devices on the same channel, you'd be better off with the HDDs as master/slave on the primary IDE channel and the cdrom as the master on the secondary IDE channel.

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## pmjdebruijn

agent_jdh,

Are you sure on that... I though it was better to do just that... 

bus0: HD0, CDburner

bus1: HD1, CDrom

This way the load is distributed over the controller... 

A new harddisk pushes 40-50mb/s

When putting two harddrives on the same channel, then it will get cosy... ata100 will barely be able to give max performance...

So, I don't agree with you...

BTW: If I'm not mistaken ATA and ATAPI are exactly the same! (not 100% sure though)

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## agent_jdh

 *drz wrote:*   

> agent_jdh,
> 
> Are you sure on that... I though it was better to do just that... 
> 
> bus0: HD0, CDburner
> ...

 

ATA and ATAPI are technically not the same.  They use the same interface though, but it isn't advisable to mix them on the same IDE bus.

You'd be much better going with

IDE0: HD0,HD1

IDE1: CDRom,CDBurner

And as the max continuous data throughput of a modern drive is ~45mb/s then you'll be OK on an ATA100 interface.  And if drives/interfaces get much faster then something will have to be done about the PCI bus as that will be saturated with I/O and become the bottleneck.

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## zalix!

I've had an IBM deskstar 45 GB go bad. It worked fine for a year or so.

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## AgenT

This is somewhat OT (but hey, think of it as a free bump), but how does one go about analyzing a HD (for bad sectors, etc.) on Linux not using HD-specific (as in SMART) tech?

And I had a VERY bad experience with old WD drives (back in the p133 days). Those things gave me bad sectors after like 5 reformats (hey, it was during the win95/98 days, what did you expect?). Other than that, no problems with any HD that I have ever seen except during accidents such as a friend falling on his PC once while running a game which killed the hard drive.

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## agent_jdh

 *AgenT wrote:*   

> This is somewhat OT (but hey, think of it as a free bump), but how does one go about analyzing a HD (for bad sectors, etc.) on Linux not using HD-specific (as in SMART) tech?
> 
> And I had a VERY bad experience with old WD drives (back in the p133 days). Those things gave me bad sectors after like 5 reformats (hey, it was during the win95/98 days, what did you expect?). Other than that, no problems with any HD that I have ever seen except during accidents such as a friend falling on his PC once while running a game which killed the hard drive.

 

The best way is to interrogate the drive to see if there are any entries in the grown defect list, but I don't know of any Linux tools that can do this.  We used proprietary software where I worked that ran under Dos.  I've got an all-scsi system at home and Adaptec EZ-SCSI under Windows provides that function.

The best you can probably do is to run fsck on each partition with the -c option, this checks for bad blocks (and is non-destructive).  Best to only do it on unmounted partitions so you might want to boot off a LiveCD to do this.

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## Nope

Hello,

I had two IBM 40GB Deskstar that die on me. 

And.. surprisingly several IBM 16GB SCA-SCSI drives. I think all over all there were three of them dying in 1,5 years. They worked in a RAID5 system.

I have an old 20 GB Maxtor that is working without a glitch since a few years and I recently purchased a 120GB Samsung. Although 5400 rpm this drive is quite fast. But I have several non-contiguous inodes on it. So I don't trust it really.

Nope

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## someguy

i have a 10 gig ibm thats worked REALLY well  ummm i have had bad luck with western digital (30 gig models) had 3 of them die on me in a year 

but ive got one of those 180 gig maxtors with the controller card and 8 mg cache 

its blazin well thats my 2 cents l8r

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## bos_mindwarp

I have lost 3 drivs in past 2 years (I have 3 PC's, 1 firewall, 1 server, and a desktop). All three of them were IBM Deskstars, 1 30Gb, 1 60Gb and 1 80Gb.

Recently I switched over to Western Digital drives, and so far so good (crosses fingers).

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## Reformist

I just recently had an IBM Deskstar XP 60GB drive fail on me.... apparently lots of people have trouble with this model drive, and a friend of mine has had 4 of them reliably fail on him within 4 years. IBM seems to replace them just fine, but they DIE!!! Lost all of my data (hadn't run backup in a month, because I changed locations). Anyway, Seagate all the way for me from now on... I have 2 80GB WD's, and they've never crashed (although they haven't been under much stress).

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## Malakin

 *Quote:*   

> It's good that you've got a space between the drives

 This is an excellent point, always leave gaps between your drives, don't sandwich them together. If you've run out of 3.5" space use a 3.5"->5.25" adapter.

 *Quote:*   

> This is somewhat OT (but hey, think of it as a free bump), but how does one go about analyzing a HD (for bad sectors, etc.) on Linux not using HD-specific (as in SMART) tech?

 man badblocks

 *Quote:*   

> ATA and ATAPI are technically not the same. They use the same interface though, but it isn't advisable to mix them on the same IDE bus.
> 
> You'd be much better going with
> 
> IDE0: HD0,HD1
> ...

 

I couldn't dissagree with this more. Putting the hard drives on different ide channels allows them to be used simultaneously, otherwise one has to wait for the other, this removes a lot of performance benefit you can get out of using a 2nd drive for your swap partition etc..

If you plan on doing CD copying or moving data between drives you'll get much better performance if you make a hard drive master and CDROM slave on each channel. Try to keep your CD Burner on a different channel then the hard drive it's usually burning data from though.

A quote from the ATA FAQ:

"ATAPI uses the ATA hardware interface at the physical level but uses a subset of the SCSI command set at the logical level."

http://www.ata-atapi.com/hiwfaq.htm

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## AgenT

 *Quote:*   

> man badblocks

  Thank you!

 *Quote:*   

>  *Quote:*   
> 
> You'd be much better going with
> 
> IDE0: HD0,HD1
> ...

 

Malakin is correct. You do NOT want to do this:

IDE0: HD0,HD1

IDE1: CDRom,CDBurner

Instead, you are much better off doing this:

IDE0: HDA, CDRom

IDE1: HDB, CDBurner

I assume that HDA will be your main HD. This setup will give you the following. First, when using a CDRom, it is unlikely that you will also need to do heavy work on the HD and vice-versa. Second, if you ever need to burn files from your HD (HDA), having the CDBurner on a different IDE channel will aliviate the stress one will cause on the other. The same is true when doing direct cd to cdr copies since they will both be on two different channels. The only bad thing about this setup (and you will always have some type of bottleneck when using four deviced on two channels) is burning from HDB to the CDBurner. Note, that if you ever need to do something cd intensive which might interfere with HDA, you can always use CDBurner instead of CDRom. Hope that helps...

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## agent_jdh

 *AgenT wrote:*   

>  *Quote:*   man badblocks  Thank you!
> 
>  *Quote:*    *Quote:*   
> 
> You'd be much better going with
> ...

 

No, no, no.  We did a lot of work into this at the large-oem-that-shall-remain-nameless I used to work for as an IDE HDD engineer.  We found that there was little or no _relative_ (I'll touch on this later) performance loss in using 2 HDD's on the same IDE channel, as long as the DMA mode used was sufficient to allow both drives headroom to operate at their maximum steady-state throughput (obviously there was a performance hit when both drives tried to empty their caches simultaneously, but this is a very fast transient aspect of an HDDs performance and not as important as the constant data streaming aspect of the drive).  Even 2 fast 7200rpm HDDs can not saturate an ATA-100 interface, and with new ATA-133 and SATA interfaces this is even less of an issue.

I'm fully aware that ATAPI (Advanced Technology Attachment - Packet Interface) is a protocol layer on top of ATA to enable the use of what are essentially (internally) SCSI removable media devices on a physical ATA connector.  It still does not mean that mixing ATA and ATAPI devices on the same channel is OK.

Now when we looked at accessing devices on each channel when a mix of ATA and ATAPI devices were on the same channel, e.g. in a configuration as you are recommending, there was the potential for HDD access on each channel to be crippled when using the ATAPI device simultaneously - sometimes even when the ATAPI device was not in use.  Now there were a lot of variables that came in to play regarding precisely what level of performance hit there was (type of ATAPI device e.g. cdrom, cdrw, ide zip disk etc; manufacturer of HDD and ATAPI device, firmware revisions of all the devices, motherboard chipset, operating system drivers etc etc) - you can see that this instantly adds up to quite a complex little equation and that it would be _very_ difficult to advise on what mixes of devices would be OK and what could potentially lead to a significant performance hit.  It was obvious to us that the path of least resistance to consistent performance without having to worry about all those variables was not to mix the two protocols on the same IDE channel.

Now earlier on I talked about _relative_ performance hits.  Don't get me wrong, having four devices on two IDE channels will incur a hit regardless of the configuration, we were looking to minimise the hit for most of the people most of the time.  This touches upon one of the fundamental limitations of the IDE I/O subsystem - it just isn't as good as SCSI at coping with accessing lots of devices without slowing down.

Now when all is said and done, if you are happy with your IDE setup and there are no obvious slowdowns for your usage profile, then "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".  All I'm doing is advising what is generally the best course of action in a non-specific case.

If you have four IDE devices and are really searching for best performance, it might be an idea to get a PCI IDE card for your 2nd HDD and connect it to that, thus giving both of your HDDs maximum bandwidth on its own IDE channel.  As a lot of mobos these days are coming with raid controllers/sata connectors in addition to the standard IDE ports, it may not even be necessary to buy an external card.

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## dwstrebel

I think it is your own prefrence just some people like gentoo and some people like Slackware, but stay away from ibm

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## AgenT

 *agent_jdh wrote:*   

> <enter long post here from above>

 

Score: +5, Informative

Very nice and easy to follow analysis of what you and the company you worked for did. Thank you!

My one question is this, were there problems from having both the cdrom and cdrw on the same channel? Especially when doing cd-to-cdr copy? Or, being an OEM, was this not expected from your customer?

[Note that I do use more than one HD/cdrw so that each device has its own channel. And your advice on getting an extra ide card hits the nail on the coffin.]

P.S. What is with the forum and adding useless end tags at the end of messages upon submit? Very windows like of it!  :Sad: Last edited by AgenT on Tue Aug 05, 2003 9:37 pm; edited 2 times in total

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## agent_jdh

 *dwstrebel wrote:*   

> I think it is your own prefrence just some people like gentoo and some people like Slackware, but stay away from ibm

 

LARF.  Don't you mean Hitachi   :Smile: 

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## agent_jdh

 *AgenT wrote:*   

>  *agent_jdh wrote:*   <enter long post here from above> 
> 
> Score: +5, Informative
> 
> Very nice and easy to follow analysis of what you and the company you worked for did. Thank you!
> ...

 

Cheers.  You have no idea of the amount of work involving spreadsheets and graphs I had to do on this one   :Wink: 

To answer your question, cd-to-cdr copying was one of the main considerations that was looked into, and, to paraphrase our conclusion (I say 'our', but basically it was mine), "atapi devices are so slow in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make a blind bit of difference".  Errr, with the caveat that they at least support some decent DMA mode e.g. UDMA33.

It's much better to avoid any potential conflict of interest between ATA and ATAPI devices that may or may not behave with each other than it is to worry about the other stuff.

Re an additional PCI IDE card, if you have the spare PCI slot and IRQ to go with it, splitting up your HDDs in this manner rather than mixing them up with ATAPI devices is _definitely_ the best solution, bar switching to SCSI, which is what I use in my main home box that has multiple devices.

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## AgenT

Thank you again for your expertise in the subject. 

Besides working on the IDE bus, have you done any extensive research on other "bottlenecks" (or the lack of) such as memory bandwidth, I/O, etc?

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## agent_jdh

 *AgenT wrote:*   

> Thank you again for your expertise in the subject. 
> 
> Besides working on the IDE bus, have you done any extensive research on other "bottlenecks" (or the lack of) such as memory bandwidth, I/O, etc?

 

The next big bottleneck is the PCI bus.  It's a severe performance issue with lots of devices trying to grab a chunk of bandwidth at the same time.  PCI is outdated in a modern system.

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## TripKnot

People, don't waste time with this "what drives have/have not worked" crap.  Why reinvent the wheel when storagereview.com already has a drive reliability database.

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## Malakin

 *Quote:*   

> We found that there was little or no _relative_ (I'll touch on this later) performance loss in using 2 HDD's on the same IDE channel

 This isn't what I experience and it's simple to test. Copying files from hda->hdb is slower then copying files from hda->hdc. Or you can do a kernel compile on a machine without much ram with a swap file on hda and hdc, it's faster with it on hdc.

 *Quote:*   

> Now when we looked at accessing devices on each channel when a mix of ATA and ATAPI devices were on the same channel, e.g. in a configuration as you are recommending, there was the potential for HDD access on each channel to be crippled when using the ATAPI device simultaneously - sometimes even when the ATAPI device was not in use.

 I think what you're referring to is older buggy CD drives, as far as I know this isn't a problem anymore.

 *Quote:*   

> Even 2 fast 7200rpm HDDs can not saturate an ATA-100 interface

 Some of the newer 7200rpm drives are able to do a little over 50MB/s and most new drives do just under 50MB/s so it's quite possible a 100MB/s interface is a bottleneck in some cases.

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## Blurpy

I had an IBM 20gb drive that suddenly got "click-of-death". I almost thought my pc was going to explode with all that ticking inside. I got a few bluescreens (win98, a looong time ago), and a couple of lockups from that disk before I sent it back for replacement. It was around a year old when it started happening.

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## xTango

I buried two IBM DeskStar (20 GB, 7200 RPM).

And I've seen some Quantum BigFoot die (being they almost new).

I've had some bad experiencies with Seagate (Medallist) being too d*mn slow, so I don't like them. WD are my favourites. They're pretty fast, even the 5400 RPM models.

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