[BC] Comparing computers & parts

[Lamar Owen]

On Monday 29 October 2007, Kevin Tekel wrote:
> Oh, and remember MiniScribe?  Yikes, their drives were horrid -- slow,
> NOISY, and poorly constructed.  Even brand new, they were loaded with bad
> sectors.  

All hard drives have bad sectors.  The ATA interface just hides them through 
remapping of spares.  Many times the 'recovery scan' in the diagnostics just 
does a remap of found bad sectors with spares; when you're out of spares the 
drive is billed as 'bad' by the diags when in reality it might not be bad or 
failing.  I have a pair of 250GB Maxtors that were in a server that developed 
serious +12V problems; bad sectors that were unremappable occurred due to the 
bad 12V power (the drives were, without warning, being spun down and up 
without the 5V being killed; this 'scribbles' on the platters if a write is 
in progress when the head starts unloading/parking).  The diags labeled the 
drives as bad.  I formatted under Linux, using mke2fs with the -c option, and 
am using these drives just nicely (the -c runs badblocks first, and the 
filesystem maps those bad sectors as unusable, and it will not use them).  
Been a couple of years now, and they're still running nicely (in a 
noncritical app, of course!).
--
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu