Cheap HD's

[Scroggie]

Just picked up two 60gig Maxxtor 7200rpm HD's at office depot for 19 dollars after refunds (36 instant, 25 mail in). Good for fun with any OS

[BigDoc]

Just picked up two 60gig Maxxtor 7200rpm HD's at office depot for 19 dollars after refunds (36 instant, 25 mail in). Good for fun with any OS
That is dirt cheap, I remember paying about a dollar per Megabyte :eek:

[Kursk]

Does this make you want to try some RAID action? Alice (of the "hard edge" in computer shopper) was ripping on serial drives as offering too little performance for the increase in price. Although I have the capability for serial drives on my AMD boards I just couldn't justify the price differential and added more memory instead.

[Scroggie]

I just downloaded and am using "mirroring" software, that lets me mirror folders on the master drive to the slave and a network. You can set sync, mirror, back up etc with it.
Redundancy with adding RAID.
the shareware is called ViceVersa Pro.

[alborg]

Hi guys:

You guys should be careful about the drives- use them for backups mainly. While in Panama, I ran into a IT magazine article about "faulty Maxtor drives". Here's a URL of a newsgroup that's discussing this problem:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=1366854

Here's a jist of the initial post:

"Maxtor battles to quell channel fury

IT Europa (UK/Pan-European), August 2004

HDD vendor Maxtor has fiercely denied signing a pan-European distribution agreement with Singapore-based disti eSys in order to offload a bulk shipment of faulty drives rejected by OEM partner Dell. But leading players in Maxtor's European channel have cast serious doubts on the vendor's version of events, claiming that with their return rates for faulty Maxtor products reaching 'unacceptable' levels important questions remain unanswered.

'Maxtor would never ship defective products,' says Mike Cordano, executive VP global sales and marketing at the drive giant. 'Approximately 36,000 drives were returned to us by Dell earlier in the year, but they were never reshipped.' Maxtor claims the 40 gigabyte drives had been deployed in a non-PC point of sale application that they had not been designed for, resulting in a high failure rate. On taking back the drives, Maxtor claims it quarantined the products, broke them up and added the component parts to its repair population. It also began a 'revalidation process' with Dell. Cordano says: 'We've adjusted our 40 gig product to extend its usage capabilities and Dell has embarked on testing of the product.'...

Checkout if the serial numbers/models are those that might have been dumped on the market...

Regards,
Al

[Scroggie]

quarantined the products, broke them up and added the component parts to its repair population
that just sounds wrong, like the plot of some sci-fi movie

[alborg]

When I was in Panama in August, my secondary 40MB $150 Maxtor drive of my laptop failed! Actually, there was a real good reason for this... it had a hugh dent on the top facing that occurred during my travel to that country (as Scroggie says- "Not Cardioprotective!"). I was desparate, in that this was supposed to be my backup drive to store my vacation programming "experiences", so I purchased one of them star screw drivers, tore off the label that stated "If you open this- warranty is voided!", and simply popped out the dent, straightened the platters slightly, and it worked! It still gets its daily workout without a hitch. Sooo... there's my HD horrer story. Motto: I guess not all Maxtor drives are throwaways...

Al

[ozzie]

you can see 10 millions of an inch to align platters ???
You should be in the electron microscope biz you can see and interpret
if I were you I would not plan on keeping any important data on that drive

snip
The clearance between a disk head and the disk surface is about 10 millionths of one inch. With this small difference, contamination such as a smoke particle, fingerprint, dust particle, or human hair could render the drive unusable. Sealed disk drives are designed to minimize contamination.

[alborg]

>>> The clearance between a disk head and the disk surface is about 10 millionths of one inch. With this small difference, contamination such as a smoke particle, fingerprint, dust particle, or human hair could render the drive unusable. Sealed disk drives are designed to minimize contamination.

Hi ozzie!

Look- when I was a teenager I used to crack open locks in school... for fun. Cracking open this hard disk brought me back to my younger days! It was either trash the thing or try to fix and save some $$$.

The fact that it's still working is a testament to my "true talent"... a testament to the fact that in my prior life I must have been part of the ***underworld*** he he he... a safe cracker maybe? (taking my evening Zyprexa dose)

Really- the thing still works! Obviously, it's used as a backup drive only...

Regards,
Al

[Kursk]

http://www.inphase-technologies.com/news/firstholoproto.html

[alborg]

http://www.inphase-technologies.com/news/firstholoproto.html

Now that's one cool disk... 1.5 TB??? WOW!!! :eek: When HMO's begin to force me into seeing 1000 patients a day this should cover the storage problems... BTW my laptop HD that I took apart while vacationing in Panama keeps on going... and going... and going... strong. :D

Regards,
Al

[ozzie]

http://www.ecost.com/ecost/shop/detail.asp?dpno=371409
One day when I have the time to play and the funding to explore.
I will be looking at USB flash drives in a raid config , just boot off the flash drive and run the linux os in ram and write to another partition. Would not matter what the host system was, just need to support USB 2.0.. few and an ethernet usb nic card and you would have tiny cool fast secure and redundant server. With a little rechargable battery pack you could even have a total host failure and not lose much data. ( you would lose current sessions only )

oz

[Kursk]

Wow Oz, didn't realize how much the price had dropped on the keydrives!

[buslick]

This Linux will run from a USB drive Oz: http://www.goosee.com/puppy/

[BigDoc]

Booting Linux from a USB drive :eek:
That is impressive, last time I checked, you needed a DVD-R/RW?? to boot from, how do they manage to fit the system files under 50MB?? :confused:

[buslick]

There are several distros of Linux that boot from a CD like Knoppix. The problem with those is you need to keep the CD in the drive. The puppy linux is a slimmed down version the actually has a lot of functionality. It can fit on a mini CD = 50 MB. It loads into RAM. It runs very fast since the whole thing is in RAM. It does write some stuff to the hard drive, but not much, just the config data and your document files, etc. If you are running it off a USB drive it can keep you documents on the USB drive instead of the hard drive. Go to the site and you can see all the cool stuff they can jam into 50 MB.

[ozzie]

I am not thinking about client devices but servers.
More like here is the server device, plug it into any usb 2.0 powered device and you are up and running. So any PC MAc etc runnign can now be a server and as the cost is very low you can have a couple rsyncing each other and be software AND hardware redundant.
The client end devices, which would run an IPsec vpn to the server. Which would be nothing more than 1 gig usb storage devices..
So the host can be anything any OS, no security, no HIPPA crap to worry about..
Of course the host can be an exisiting desktop laptop etc running a browser also. But for $100 or so I like the idea of your own device this way you can take todays work home for review transfer billing offsite backup or whatever. Also this keeps the complete system stable and the outside world will never get access to the USB devices. OS System uprades are trivial.

A 5 station worstation system could run for maybe $2500 which would include 2 servers.. All you would need is 5 PC MAC or whatever networked that support USB 2.0


oz