1 Jun
2004
1 Jun
'04
9:14 p.m.
On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 17:42, Malcolm Baldridge wrote:
Wow, $90 is a very good price (although I haven't priced any in a few
years).
Yep, that's for sure.
We actually had to go looking for drives while in Honolulu. Searched
all over the island and couldn't find a single SCSI drive (this was in
2000). We finally had to order from the mainland. We drove over to
Comp USA and bought 4 new 60GB IDE drives for about the cost of shipping
for the SCSI drives and external enclosure.
If it's not rough you can't tell your on a ship. It looks like an
office. The ships are 333 feet (100 meters) long. The main lab is
about 30x100 feet. I've been flying gear since the early 80s on P3s and
haven't had a problem with vibration. What used to fail the most was
monitors.
That was funny. I needed a 1GB drive for a very old PC and I couldn't
find one anywhere in Singapore.
Thanks for the link! That looks really helpful. Luckily I'm not
having to put these in myself we're just now testing a couple of 3.75TB
Pogo Linux servers for field work.
Jan
[**WARNING** This is starting to drift off-topic from
Linux-Audio ]
Maybe not. I think it might come under the heading of "know your
tools".
At work
I've gone away from SCSI for three reasons - first is cost,
Yes, in cost per GB, nothing beats IDE. But for most sizes of drives, the
extra cost of SCSI isn't that bad. I've paid $90 for the last few 36GB
drives, which is quite reasonable really considering it's a 10,000 RPM drive
with a large cache and a good warranty.
second is that
the speed difference isn't very much anymore,
One thing I seem to notice is that many SCSI drives don't seem to use the
full platter in order to keep the heads over the "dense" zones of the media.
When I examine the transfer rate curves of my Fujitsu MAS 10K RPM drives,
for example, the difference between inner and outer edge throughput isn't
anywhere near as great as the difference in performance between the
inner+outer edges of my WD 200GB drive, for example.
For another thing... I know I can't prove this scientifically, but I have
ALOT of samples from different manufacturers and time periods over the past
15 years. My SCSI drives last a very long time, and when they've finally
kicked the bucket (rarely after less than 6 years), I've had ample warning
[LOG SENSE notifications of soft-retry counts, etc].
In contrast, my IDE drives have failed abruptly and
without warning, many
times before the warranty was expired. I have a bucket of such drives,
which I intend to take the platters out to make attractive and very smooth
drinks coasters.
The IDE bucket has drives from Seagate, Quantum (the most common being the
Fireballs, an apt name if I ever heard one), and Maxtor. Oddly, I have yet
to throw a dead Western Digital drive into the Drive Bucket of Doom - but
that could be because I had a bias against the brand for a long time. But I
do have many running WDs in current systems as they tend to be the fastest
drives available for IDE. I remain offended that they are the only IDE
drive manufacturer which doesn't include a thermal sensor in their drives.
I've got a pretty big SCSI bucket but we go through hundreds of drives.
I have functioning SCSI drives in several machines
from Seagate, Quantum
[dating back to the 1.6" 400MB PD-series, circa 1992 as well as a
hot-running Grand Prix Wide-Differential 4GB drive circa 1996], IBM, and DEC
[pre-Quantum acquisition]. This latter drive is a VERY BUSY Squid Proxy
Cache drive in my home network server [same one which does the audio logging
from the MERLIN phone system].
I can get my hands on a really nice 40MB Unisys disk drive.
Unfortunately it's the size of a washing machine (it is removable though
;-)
third is that
you can't get SCSI in Djibouti (or Honolulu for
that matter).
Really? That's a bit surprising.
I work with ship and airborne data
collection/processing systems.
Those use hard disks? Fascinating. I'd have thought the environments were
too harsh. Your work sounds interesting, though, Jan.
We've had
problems getting
SCSI drives anywhere but the states (or Singapore, although I had
problems there once - I couldn't find anything old ;-)
Ouch. That's amazing.
Now we're
starting to switch to SATA for the same reason.
UGH, SATA, at least in this first generation, is a mess. I've been
following some of the T13 standards discussions about it, and things don't
look very pretty there. All I can suggest is that you validate specific
drives to controller chipsets for the time being, and watch your cabling
lengths despite marketing b.s. which claims it can be "very long". Do not
violate the "grounding rules", and don't run SATA cables outside of
reasonably shielded environments if they have a great deal of radio emissions.
There are some publicly-accessible discussions of these issues, so this
isn't just FUD. See <http://www.ata-atapi.com/sata.htm> -- the author, Hale
Landis, is an involved member of the NCITS T13 [formerly X3T13] committee,
and has contributed a significant body of work to the ATA standards over the
years.