"X ` Man" wrote in message
...

On 11/18/11 12:11 PM, Califbill wrote:
"X ` Man" wrote in message
m...

On 11/17/11 9:38 PM, Califbill wrote:
wrote in message ...

On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:09:01 -0500, X ` Man
wrote:

I had a choice of drives for my server, so I bought four of these:

Seagate Constellation ES 2 TB Internal hard drive - 300 MBps - 7200 rpm


Seagate/Maxtor is a pretty good drive


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The problem with Apple, at least in former days, was you had to buy the
drive from Apple at excessive price. Same frikken drive as on a PC but
with a unique identifier in the SCSI packet. I designed Maxtor drives
and they were the same exact drive except for the identifier. The
problem with WD drives was getting them to be reliable at 7200 rpm. As
Jim McCoy, Chairman of Maxtor when I worked there, stated, anyone can
build a 3600 rpm drive, hard to handle the head flying and control at
7200 rpm. Lots of turbulence at the extra rpm.

That's no longer the case. You can buy drives in many sizes
from many vendors. I could upgrade the drive in my laptop, for example,
in about 10 minutes.

The server I have is made by Synology, not Apple. There is a long list
of recommended drives you can use with it. The device comes "driveless,"
as it were. Took longer to take the four drives out of their packaging
than it did to install them in the server.


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But how many of those 7200 rom drives are reliable? As to lots of
vendors, lots. As to manufacturers, shrinking all the time.


How many decades ago were you designing drives? Isn't it possible drives
have gotten more reliable? In my last Windows PC, I had a 10,000 rpm
drive. It was perfectly reliable.


===================================
10 years ago. But still the mechanical problems rule. And if they were
perfectly reliable, you would not have to had a drive replaced. Still the
problems go up exponentially with speed. They fly closer now and more
turbulence with speed. Semi contact is almost the norm now. The error
correction helps immensely but there are still media problems. One of the
reasons I have a patent is on defect scanning. I wrote a lot of the defect
self scanning firmware for Maxtor. Interface code for Ministore and DSP
control code for Samsung and as an Apps engineer for the DSP supplier. The
higher speed and higher density makes for probably the same reliability we
had all through the 90's. Which was a lot more than the CDC, IBM and NCR
removable media 14" drives.