IBM Spins Down

beggs writes "IBM and Hitachi have signed an agreement which will take IBM out of the hard drive market in three years. This press release on IBM's web site gives some details of the deal. 18,000 IBM employees and all their hard drive related patents will join about 6,000 Hitachi employees to form a new company that will be a subsidiary of Hitachi. Sad to see big blue out of the hard drive business, they have made a lot of contributions to computing." We did a story when they announced their plans back in April.

Comments

Yay! No more Death Stars!

[webslacker]

The IBM Death Star has been defeated! The rebellion has won! :D

Re:IBM Made $2.05 billion in the deal.

[zbuffered]

I'm guessing Hitachi's going to find in a few months that they got 18,000 migrant workers and dummies propped up with sticks.

don't forget

[cr@ckwhore]

don't forget to park the heads before shutting off the lights.

75gxp

[nikitin2k]

Sad to see big blue out of the hard drive business, they have made a lot of contributions to computing. Yeah, it's really sad. I'll espacially miss the 75gxp series.

Re:So that means...

[Beliskner]

Linux people are so unadventurous, put some *fun* into your lives, admit your secret desires, just as Michael Jordan gets excited at playing basketball, frantically dealing with read errors and sector not found errors by making an emergency backup injects spice into our lives, *feel* the adrenalin.

Sector and read failures are an integral part of the ATA standard and are passed via the HD controller as responses to failures. People have NO RIGHT to complain about these failures in 75gxp, the linux kernel and fs subsystems are even designed to handle these errors gracefully and not panic. Do you complain when Java <throws> an exception? No, you put some code in the catch(e){}; Instead of complaining, do something about it, ext2 and ext3 should be adjusted so that you can use,

ext2 make install --unreliableHD-12

where the use of this switch whilst compiling ext2 will automatically incorporate RAID5-on-a-drive-Reed-Solomon-type ECC in the fs module with an ability to handle a 12percent probability of sector failure per year. The fs source code will decide the Shannon's minimum ECC distance on this information and inline the appropriate strength of ECC to absorb these failures, these extra ECC blocks will be stored on different tracks because HDs have a distinct lack of spatial ECC making them vulnerable to head-scratch and cylinder-not-found errors(?).

So there, we can all use 75gxp now, if the drive's own IDE ECC can't handle read errors, then instead escalate and use the added ECC in the ext2fs subssytem or in the kernel to perform ECC. That way the paranoid among us can hedge their bets against read failures and sector not found failures. Obviously global drive malfunctions such as total drive electronics failure or total bearing failure won't be protected against. Heck WinRAR compression has this ECC feature built in, why can't a fs which is far more critical have it built in? Quit whining.