[geeks] IBM 120GXP ATA/100

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

> >Every single one of them has been running 24/7 for the last year or so.
> 
> Mine ran fine 24/7 for ~ 1 year until a power failure, then after it cooled 
> it failed to spin up again, just making a clunk-clunk-clunk noise

  I wasn't even that lucky.  I just installed the drive in my machine
sometime in January.  I ran the machine nowhere -near- 24/7.  In fact,
there were weekss that I didn't even power my PC on, due to being chained
to work at the office.

  The drive died late last week.  Win2k tried to page something into
memory, and I was greeted with "click..click..GRINDgrindgrindgrind...
click-click....scraaaatch.. thunk... click click".  I heard it halfway
across the house and couldn't -imagine- what would sound like a mechanized
gerbil trying to chew through the chassis of my PC.

  I got -really- familiar with the Win2k recovery tools that morning. I
finally got all my data back[1].  Now I just need to call IBM and get the
thing RMAed.  Drives should -not- die after less than two months of
intermittent use.  Yes, it was made in Hungary--just like the other failed
ones I had to deal with at the office.

  I can't figure out what happened.  The inside of the machine wasn't
really that hot.  At least, the drive was no warmer sitting on the desk
that it was in the PC.  The power didn't seem any less stable.
Apparently, it was just a dodgy disc.

  I'm back on my Octane now--far away from the evils of IDE and other PC
hardware.  I don't consider the IBM Model M to be PC hardware, BTW.  It's
IBM Unix hardware that happens to be PC-compatible. :)

--Jonathan
[1] Rip on Microsoft as you will, but NTFS5 is actually a decent
    filesystem.  They finally figured out[2] what to -do- with those
    redundant copies of the superblocks.  About damned time, eh?
[2] The backup copy of the FAT in FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 was never used,
    other than as a parity check.  In the DOS days, if the two copies were
    out of sync, the primary was copied -over- the backup!!!  With the
    dawn of the Win95 days, they figured out how to regrow both with a
    filesystem traversal.  In NTFS5, multiple copies are used to regrow
    the primary, in case of corruption--you know, like Unix has been doing
    for decades.