[Gllug] Potential dodgy hard drive? What to do

[Richard Cottrill]

I used to work for a company that moved large numbers of machines across the
country as POPs for its ISP business. Anyway these beasties were headless,
armless, wheteverless. Plug in a ISDN cable and a satellite feed and it
goes... Very nifty.

Oh yes, and apparently there is/was some problem with the tty drivers when
you plug in 60 - 80 high speed modems through one tty or something. I tried
to get them to release the code back to the community but no dice.

Anyway they had awful problems with dead machines (dying hard discs mostly -
Ah hah! the point!) until they retrofitted the power supplies with
third-party fans (ball-raced little powerhouses that sound like a jet
engine). No problems since. Seems that when the fans died, they took the
hard disc with them.

I might point out that these were the cheapest machines that money could
buy. Where Microsoft is driven by market-share or marketing, this place ran
on $$$$. It seems that one of the places that it's easy to shave off money
is by buying dodgy PSUs and changing over their fans.

Richard

> -----Original Message-----
> From: gllug-admin at linux.co.uk [mailto:gllug-admin at linux.co.uk]On Behalf
> Of Chris Bell
> Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 7:59 AM
> To: gllug at linux.co.uk
> Subject: Re: [Gllug] Potential dodgy hard drive? What to do
>
>
> On Thu 08 Nov, Peter John Cameron wrote:
> >
> > A month ago, I bought an IBM 75GXP Deskstar 76Gb hard drive
> specifically for
> > Suse 7.3. I shopped around on the net to find the cheapest
> price and amongst
> > dabs.com, simply.co.uk and insight.com/uk, the cheapest was Simply. I
> > ordered one for home and a smaller drive for work.
> >
> > Last night, whilst surfing in a moment of boredom, I came
> across reports of
> > the 75GXP 76Gb drives being dodgy, and eventually found myself at
> > storagereview.com. I checked the three sites above, and now not
> one of them
> > is now listing the 75GXP drive.
> >
> > I mentioned this on the Suse list and was advised to buy a new drive.
> >
> > So, what should I do? The drive cost me 190. I'm intending to
> phone Simply
> > and ask if they have that drive in stock and then ask why they
> don't sell
> > it, and then say I bought one a month ago from them.
> >
> > Any best approach advise?
> >
> > Peter
>
>    General rather than specific experience tells me that the larger the
> drive capacity the greater the need for adequate cooling of the drive, and
> the lower the temperature the longer the problem-free life. Computers
> specifically designed as long-life servers have large airflows past the
> drives.
>
>
> --
> Chris Bell
>
>
> --
> Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
> http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug
>


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