wrote in message news
On Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:02:15 -0800, "Califbill"
wrote:


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.

I always wondered why operating systems did not collect soft error
statistics on hard drives. Usually the first time you know you have a
problem is when you get that "cannot read from device" error and that
may actually be an epitaph. You certainly need to stop and get the
drive backed up right then, hoping there is still something there to
back up. Hopefully your last backup is not that old.

I am really becoming a RAID fan, now that drives are cheap enough to
make it reasonable. I have 2 RAIDED sets in different machines with a
lot of the same data on each of them and things I really care about
are also on a portable drive. Things like pictures, music etc are
scattered around all over the place so it would be hard to lose them
all.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the late 80's I was working on a design for one of the first RAID systems
with hot swap and auto rebuild. Unfortunately the company had a layoff and
Hugh Sierra who I was working with on the RAID design was one of the layoffs
and they scrapped the program. We could have been the EMC powerhouse. Hugh
Sierra http://www.amazon.com/Hugh-M.-Sierra/e/B001KD286K had probably more
patents for disk drives at IBM than anybody else. System Industries made a
really big errors in judgment as to what to design. Turned down Sun when
they wanted us to design a file server for them in the early years of Sun
among others.