UPDATE TIME!The 386 motherboard is STILL on the workbench - my repair guy needs to get a new soldering iron, since his current one is a total piece of garbage, so there is no ETA for the repair. Well, i can wait two more months...
Now, to the dumpster! Fresh loot has arrived to the lab, directly from the finest university offices... i fell like in x-mas
- Fishin' on the box: Look, Ma', we will have mouses for dinner!
- A bunch of (possibly working) Pentium II/III carts:
- Assorted ribbon cables. Without slot-connector for 5.25" drives, those are useless.
- SLOTCKETS! L@@k, R@RE!
- PSU extravaganza! All the fried PSUs that you can need EVUR!
- My university still does not know what the heck is a DVD... All of these are 50X-56X CD drives. Heck, even a floppy drive is WAY more useful than a CD reader those days!
- And now, the best part of the loot: a couple of stacks of the finest hard drives that your taxpaying money can buy:
- When sorted, those HDs can be interpreted as a per-brand failure graph:
From left to right: WD, Quaxtor (Maxtor-branded Fireballs), Maxtor (what a surprise..
), Samsung, Seagate, Fujitsu... and JTS.
From those drives: all Sammy's were OK, most Maxtors were dead or bugged (save for a dreaded 541DX that it's still ALIVE!), same for the Quaxtor, only one of the Seagates were OK, both Fuji's were perfect bricks (i have yet to see a working Fujitsu desktop drive; both of these bricks were MPG-series...), and i reserved WDs for a future session. Ah, and the JTS...
Well, here is your JTS CHAMP, model C1300-2AF (1.3GB)
IT'S ALIVE! IT'S SANE! I suppose that this is one of those rare JTS drives that survive past the first year, and last forever... I have torture-tested the drive with HDAT2 and MHDD, and it has no signals of bad and/or reallocated sectors so... better save this drive for a war museum, eh?
Take a look at the manufacturing date, this may explain why this drive is so special:
I have benchmarked this drive: it's even slower than a Quantum Bigfoot (average seek: ~22ms, while my Bigfoot CY can do ~20ms), but it's SILENT. If you wanted near-perfect silence in 1997, you should go for one of those champion drives. Remember, kids:
champions only use CHAMP drives! ;D
Ah, talking about Bigfoots... my Bigfoot CY (2.1GB) just died (it was the boot drive from Asumi, my P133 IBM box). Well, it didn't died, but it developed... bad sectors. Oh, and while messing with HDAT/MHDD/SpinRite, i managed to screwed up the data, losing my custom 2.2.27 Linux kernel, and a good OpenLinux 2.4 setup. Poor Asumi, i killed it
Bah, time to look for a distro that it's more from this century
Here is this litte big bastard (1998-vintage):
Noisy, slow... and crappy. Another fine Quantum.
(What about Quaxtor Bigfoots? Maybe they crushed a few of these to make those shitty slimline 541DX's.... heh.... quaxtors
)
And for end this HD crash course:
- This would be a nice final exam for Computer Organization lab students: Student on table A MUST fix all CD-ROM drives, while student on table B MUST fix all HDs. Miss one, and you're
FAIL! ;D
- SLIMLINE MAXTORS! THEY'RE EVERYWHERE! HURRY, BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE THEY INFECT IT WITH THEIR EVIL CORRUPTION DOOM! THINK ON THE CHILDREN!
Left: DiamondMax 8 Plus (6K040L0, 40GB, 2005, China, has a bunch of reallocated sectors, and more bad sectors waiting to cause havoc). Right: Firebal 541DX (2B020H1, 20GB, early 2002!!! -too late for a 20gig drive-, Singapore, it's noisy... and sane. However, it had a HUGE sticker that said "BAD"... I would have trashed that crap in the first place)-
Well, see ya in the next episode, and beware with that Maxtor legacy! Or, as known today, "Seagartumner" (Seagate-Maxtor-Quantum-Conner... and God knows what else...)
Take care, and keep up the good work killing the spam.
), Samsung, Seagate, Fujitsu... and JTS.
)
) that checked each block for access time and most of them were yellow, orange or red. I used another utility to low level format the hard drive (including the relocated sectors) and the drive worked fine after that. I used the block testing utility and all of the blocks were either blue or green (5-20 ms vs 100+ms for yellow and beyond).
