[ILUG] Hardware queries

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Niall O Broin (niall at linux.ie):

> If you could get a response from everyone here who has used multiple
> drives over time, I'm betting you'd find "I will never use X again"
> and "I will never use anything but X again" pretty evenly spread
> across all values of X.

Exactly.  But the following makes me curious:

> I have to agree with John Looney here. One's as bad as the next,
> except when somebody gets it seriously wrong and becomes very much
> worse e.g. IBM with the DeathStar series of drives.

"IBM Deskstar" was an umbrella brand covering a tremendous number of
models.  My understanding is that the "60GXP" (60GB) and "75GXP" (75GB)
series of models were the only ones that had quality control problems.
(Each of those was a standard IBM transport mechanism and platter
design, which then got an ATA or SCSI electronics card, and then was
either OEMed or not and got an actual model number tailored to its
market niche.)

Anyhow, long experience with people jumping to conclusions about
hardware from sloppy data makes me skeptical about claims that recent
IBM Deskstar drives _generally_ have high failure rates.   I'd be
interested to hear reports from people who aren't just badly remembering
and repeating the 60GXP / 75GXP reports from elsewhere.


That puts me in mind of the first of two recollections I think are
relevant.  One was from the late 1980s, when you heard everywhere how
badly Seagate hard drives sucked.  Upon examination, you found that the
various Seagate models of the day were, statistically speaking, not
significantly worse than relevant models from the competition
(Micropolis, Maxtor, Conner, Quantum, WDC, etc.), but they simply were
selling _more units_ than the others, so there were more failures by
absolute number, many of whom then went up onto BBSes, Usenet,
CompuServe, etc., to complain about that.

And I remembered this when, in the early 1990s, I spent time up on
CompuServe in the video-hardware-support forums, and was struck with how
many people were walking away from those forums thinking that relatively
good, relatively expensive (for their day) video cards such as those
based on the S3 86C911, 86C924, and 86C928 chipsets sucked.  

Did they suck?  No.  What you had was people who had upgraded from cheap
generic video cards based on Tseng Labs ET4000 chipsets, which by a
fluke happpened to be very fast at non-accelerated VGA framebuffer
operations -- such as those used by graphical games of the day.  They
paid big bucks for fancy S3-based (or similar) accelerated cards, and
then were outraged that the same graphical games were _slower_ --
because their new cards had only ordinary VGA performance, and because
those games happened not to benefit from video acceleration functions.

But the complainers -- who had _not_ done their homework before buying
-- were past reason and festooned the support forums with their gripes.
So, most people walked away believing their comments, to the effect that
that entire generation of new video cards sucked.  In error.

Thus the lasting skepticism I alluded to earlier.  And thus, I'm
inclined to think provisionally that the IBM Deskstar 75GXP and 60GXP 
series were lemons, but there's no known reason to think there was a
broader systemic problem affecting other parts of their product line.

-- 
Cheers,                                      Right to keep and bear
Rick Moen                                  Haiku shall not be abridged
rick at linuxmafia.com                           Or denied.  So there.