On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 15:08, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: > IBM drives made in the year or so have had major reliability problems. In > fact, IBM are trying to get out of the business by selling most (70%) of > their hard drive unit to Hitachi. Quantum Bigfoots have had reliability > problems as well. I am on my third 12GB Bigfoot TX after the first two > died on me. Fortunately, this one seems to be doing very well. The > Seagate Barracuda IV is, I believe, a reliable drive. I have 2 80GB > models in one machine and I've had no trouble.
Yes, in the last six months I've read many complaints and horror stories about IBM drives so it came as no surprise to me when my IBM drive died. I've had no problem with my old Quantum tho (touch wood). I've only had the Seagate approx. 4 months and so far so good - jeez its so quiet I keep checking the light to see if its doing anything! > What are your hard drive BIOS settings? Both drives set to Auto Detection in BIOS which shows: Seagate (/dev/hda) CHS=28733/16/255 Size=600025 MB Quantum (/dev/hdb) CHS=13446/15/63 Size=6506 MB > Is LBA turned on? How do you turn LBA on? I have "lba32" (without the quotes) in lilo.conf if thats what you mean. > What you should do is go to the Seagate and IBM Web sites and download > their drive diagnostic utilities. They will hopefully be able to analyse > the drives and tell you what's wrong. I went to the Seagate web site but their diagnostic utility only runs in Windoze which I'm pleased to say does not exist on this PC. My 2nd PC will have Mandrake and Windoze when my new hard drive arrives - I've just ordered an 80GB Seagate Barracuda IV. > In addition, the IBM Feature Tool > can turn off Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) on the Seagate drive, > giving you better drive performance (hdparm can do this as well, but I'm > not sure if that setting remains after a reboot) . I'll check that out. Is the drive still so quiet when AAM is turned off? Also, may I ask what your model and settings are for your 80GB Seagate drives so that I might have some idea when my new one arrives? Thanks for your input Sridhar. I'll go check out the IBM Feature Tool now. Cheers Sharrea -- The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better" so I installed Linux.
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