Now hard drives too. Re: Modern floppy disk question...

[Philip Pemberton]

In message <3.0.6.32.20050504154353.014b6b70 at pop-server.cfl.rr.com>
          "Joe R." <rigdonj at cfl.rr.com> wrote:

> I talked to
> him about this and he recommended buying an IBM drive made by Fujitsu.

1) IBM don't make hard drives anymore. Hitachi bought IBM's storage division
   after the 75GXP fiasco.
2) Fujitsu give the impression of not caring about customer satisfaction.
   I've dealt with them in the past (not their HDD division though). They
   really don't seem to care once they've got your money. Case in point: they
   made a batch of drives that had a near-99% failure rate over 12 months,
   due to Cirrus Logic changing the plastic they used for the chip packaging.
   Turned out the new stuff plated out silver over time - heat and electrical
   current accelerated it. Eventually the silver would build up on the bond
   wires and... Poof. Dead chip.
   Fujitsu's response? They voided the warranties on the affected drives. If
   you don't believe me, search for "Fujitsu" on www.theregister.co.uk. IIRC
   a lot of other IT news sources picked up on the story, and the resulting
   class-action suit.

I swear by Maxtors, but I always buy drives from the middle of the model
range. I got a 40GB 5T040H4 that failed in two years, but Maxtor RMA'd it
without a fuss.. with a 6L080J4 - the next model series up, faster seek time,
twice the capacity and IIRC they left it with the 3-year standard warranty,
starting from the manufacture date on the replacement drive.

It's probably worth mentioning that the '040 never failed completely. It just
started having trouble spinning up on cold mornings. Holding the Reset button
down for a few seconds got it spinning. Shame Ghost clobbered the superblock
when I tried to copy from the '040 to the new '080. Lost a lot of data to
that, then found a lovely technote on Symantec's website that mentioned the
bug...

Later.
-- 
Phil.                              | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB,
philpem at philpem.me.uk              | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice,
http://www.philpem.me.uk/          | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI
... Mary had a little lamb.  The doctor was surprised.