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

[Eric J Korpela]

On 5/5/05, Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote:
>                                                                       And that being said, IBM/Hitachi
> drives are the only drives I've never had fail on me.

I've had some bad experiences with drives from many manufacturers,
including IBM/Hitachi.  The problem in the IBM/Hitachi case was that
upgrading to Windows 2000 on a ThinkPad would often overwrite
"protected" cylinders containing drive configuration info.  It was a
case of "upgrade windows"=="lose your drive".  Since these cylinders
never did exist according to the controller, it wasn't fixable by mere
mortals even with a swap of the drive controller boards.

I've also had drives go simultaneously in RAID 1 configurations, which
also leads me to believe that it was a bad command to the drive that
did it.  In that case it was fixable by a controller swap from drive
that died from a mechanical failure.

The whole business of putting drive configuration info in modifiable
memory has bitten me more than once.  I would guess that more than
half of the recent vintage dead drives I have seen with "controller
failures" have been physically and electronically fine, but with
overwritten flash or on-disk configuration info.