I'm really, really unhappy at the quality control behind hard drives. Just this morning I put my foot on my 20gb Maxtor ATA66 old-and-showing-it drive. I barely set it on there and had only gotten comfortable with it as a foot rest when it made a funny noise and shut down! (No joke, I am this stupid and this did happen, and this isn't the first time.) Damn Maxtor, can't make a drive that head-crashes properly! Anyway, it still works, because it booted the Windows.NET Enterprise Server beta that this message is being typed on...
<BOFH>
Next time, I should really put it to the test. Rubber panel-beating mallet: leaves almost no marks while causing a head crash...</BOFH>
Back when I ran Linux, I compiled everything from source. I had KDE3, several flavors of the DRI project, GLIDE (yes, I had a Voodoo3), 2 revisions of the kernel at all times, everything down to my sound drivers (ALSA) were kept in/usr/src. I wondered why I was out of disk space. So, I deleted the whole directory (system working fine for a day - must not need to recompile anymore). Low and behold, 10 gigs free!
I second the power supply idea. A bad power supply caused Windowz 2k, which is the most stable Windows to date (yeah, windows, stable...), to freeze 2 minutes from bootup. It then proceeded to fry my Radeon 8500. Now, I RMA'd the Radeon and popped in an SIS card - it starts exhibiting the same behavior. Swapped my power supply out, and everything but the video card starts working properly (fried it partially, I guess)...
The guy at the computer shop showed a machine
running an Athlon with 16 hard drives in it off of a 350w power supply - plenty to convince me that mine (4.47v line anyone? perhaps 12.56v) was defective.
Anyways, when in doubt, new power supplies are cheap and replacing something can make you feel better. (especially when you smash the old one with an 8lb sledge!)
That might work for about 30 seconds before it exploded. It would be very, very hard to charge the system first - pour gas into a header tank? You'd need some special high-pressure lines and a bit more structually sound attachment system than a couple of zip-ties. The gas, once it expanded from the heat, would blow apart the system long before it reached the radiator.
Do you still have the negatives? Nikon makes some very, very nice (and fairly expensive) negative scanners - some will even feed a strip through automagically and dump each picture to a file. They hook up via SCSI. I used one of these (a cheaper version, 1 negative at a time) to scan about 200 pictures and 300 slides at one point, and it made the task very easy.
Don't be afraid to sell strange things. While most people will buy a whitebox and a copy of Windows for Dummies, there are the exceptions (geeks). Stock cold-cathode lights and window mod kits (a few of each). You can still sell some of these specialty items to regular people (as another poster mentioned) - the artsy or futuristic-deco people might like an aluminum cube instead of a plasticy tower for a case.
Keep that dead motherboard that the manufacturer won't take back or that P166 you got on a trade-in - some people (mainly me, but there might be others) need those for one thing or another. Ever try to find an RTC chip with a battery soldered to it? It can be pulled from that dead mobo that you just threw away.
Be sure not to invest yourself heavily into software - I know of two types of purchasers for the latest 'Winderz.' Those who go to Wal-mart, and those who pick up a Warez release. Don't bet your business on a third type coming into the picture - it's unlikely to happen.
Have a good return policy. Sometimes you'll sell a dud, but the customer will keep coming back if you take it and hand them a new one with no hassle. It will take a bit of your time to get it back for a manufacturer's RMA, but it's worth the extra business from a satisfied customer.
Sell higher-end parts. Let the customer know that their onboard shared-memory AGP won't cut it for that copy of Doom 3 in their hand (assuming you ignored my previous point about software), and offer them the choice of a GeForce 5 or a Radeon 10000. Offer also to install it and configure the drivers - even the simplest of choices can throw a user for a loop (or a BSOD). I personally would rather buy my stuff locally, because I have had some bad experiences with internet retailers recently.
If someone comes in inquiring about a NIC, or a "networking kit," offer the service of installing a small network in their home. Odds are that you'll catch a demi-poweruser who wants to have two machines on the cable modem at the same time, and who can set up his own network. However, you'll occasionally run into someone who can't understand the concept of an IP address, and this is where you come in. Just don't overcommit yourself, and don't get them started on the idea of having you install network cables in their walls...
Have cool stuff in the store. Let someone come in and try your latest gamerz machine with a preloaded copy of Jedi Outcast up and running, or allow them to stare at the window-modded fileserver tower, with a terabyte of disk and all those spinning fans and blinking lights. If people like your store for the amusement value as well as the products, they'll come back more often. I have two choices of local stores - a dusty old hole in the wall with a dog that tries to rape your foot whenever you come in, or a newer store with machines up and running, just waiting to be crashed^Wplayed with. Which do you think I'd choose?
I happen to be 15. Go into any of my friends' houses, and you'll see white boxes galore. All of my friends build their own systems, and most of them build systems for their families. Out of the many computers in my house, only 2 are brand-name: A cheap celeron HP, because it was laying around and I needed one for my mom, and a Dell workstation, because it was a cast-off from my dad's company (complete with 19" monitor). He runs a whitebox P2, and it does all of his Word, Excel, and Outlook virus-executing goodness with ease. Our firewall is my old K6/2-400, not really a whitebox, more of a collection of parts on a shelf! My friend's firewall has its power supply where its drive bays used to be, because its an ATX motherboard in an AT case, and the major structural member in it is a Learn Mariachi Now record (record - n. Vinyl disc, usually about 12" diameter, used for recording music by the variation of height in grooves on the surface). Another friend of mine has a Dell, but only because his parents didn't trust him with $900 worth of computer parts unless a trained screwdriver-monkey put it together, and amazingly enough it works (albeit slowly).
Tell me again why whiteboxes are not out "in the wild?" I seem to have missed your point...
6 months ago, I had a similar system: K6/2 400, 128m RAM, ISA SBPRO sound, Voodoo3 2000, 4x CD, dust-choked floppy, 20gb drive.
Now, after spending less than $1000, I have a completely new system. I wouldn't exactly call it a white box, as it's built inside of a (purple) broken SGI Iris Indigo's shell. It is a K7-1400mHz T-Bird, 512mb DDR, 20gb primary + 300gb IDE RAID, ATI Radeon 8500 64mb, nice video capture card, 300w ATX power supply that is dying, CD burner, DVD drive. A similar system would've cost a hell of a lot more than $1000 when I bought most of the stuff a few months ago, and it wouldn't look nearly as neat! Also, it wouldn't be as upgradable. Now, if only I hadn't bought that $%!@*# VIA motherboard that is incompatible with Radeons (STOP error, anyone?)
I have built many computers, for myself and friends, and have only once fried a component accidentally - a 2gb Seagate that was connected to a faulty power supply (so I guess that makes 2 things, as I threw the power supply on the floor until it failed).
However, my friend runs a server (similar to mine) in his closet, and it went through 3 (yes, 3) Linksys NICs from Office Depot. They were similar chipsets and board designs, but they weren't from the same lot - the purchases were spaced out over a few months. He popped a couple of RealTeks in there and it works fine. However, the Linksys cards proved to fail somewhat more dramatically outside of a computer.
Hint: Take a Cat5 cable, cut it in half and strip the bare ends of the wires, twist the TX+ and RX+ together, and the TX- and RX- together. Take the two twisted sets, and attach to 12v jump starter (or 120vAC line). Repeat as necessary. Video camera recommended for ultimate wow-factor-capturing. One actually failed by catching on fire! Now that's what I call a collision...
You think a Dell is hard to expand? I had an
(admittedly older) NEC computer, which was top
of the line for its day. It had 3 bays in it.
There was the standard CD bay, occupied. It had a bay with non-standard screw holes and some plastic doodads for the floppy drive. The hard drive bay was a 5 1/4" drive bay that was about as tall as a 3
1/2" bay, with a nonstandard screw pattern, taken
up by a "Quantum Bigfoot" drive. Just try and upgrade that without some major Dremel work!
If you want a prebuilt dual Athlon, look at Alienware's
Professional lines. They have a Dual Athlon base system that you can configure to your likings, and you can get a lot for $3000 from them. Plus it's color-coordinated!
Disclaimer: I have never bought or used an Alienware system.
I have bought plenty of stuff from NewEgg. The most recent purchase was 4x 80gb 7200rpm Seagate drives (no, I don't really need that much storage), and 256mb of generic RAM. I convinced a friend that PC2400 generic was much better than his PC2100 Crucial stick, and now I have 256mb of non-generic RAM (and his computer still works:-P ). I would definately buy from them again.
The only strange thing was that they shipped the
hard drives in one box, and the RAM and a couple
IDE cables in another box. Oh well, they arrived
on the same day.
However, you fail to realize that the thumbprint
is the whole idea! Just think. Multiple read passes
coupled with the subchannel data to reconstruct
the disc's information, compared to the errors
on the disc, would give the player an exact image
of your thumbprint! It would then upload this via
cellular modem, if you were playing a burned disc,
and the RIAA would come and rape you!
Taking the bait hook, line, and sinker, but here goes...
What you fail to mention is the price difference.
Is spending the time to use Linux camera access
software (SANE maybe, or just emulate a storage
device) worth the $200 you'll save by not buying
XP?
Better yet, just buy the mandrake box and install
a pirated copy of 98se dual-booted on it. You'll
have a fairly stable gaming OS (98) and a very
stable everything-else OS (Mandrake). In the mean
time, you won't have to pay the MSFT tax, thus
saving you money. Just don't let the BSA (Boy Scouts of America or Business Software Association, , take your pick) come by.
Lentium 4 (gave up good pricing for the rest of its
life), I might actually care about Rambus. I say,
screw them. They need to be seriously beaten for
what they're trying to do to the memory industry. Long live DDR, and RAMBUS can suc^H^H^H, I mean die!!!
In other news, RAMBUS (RMBS (?)) sues Fisher Price
for use of the color red and the word 'bus'.
More at 11.
I think that this is an inflammatory and degrading
statement to those of us, me included, whose brains have been scientifically proven not to work at all.
This is fine for intraoffice communication, but
what about the real world? I think that a solution
for connection VoIP -> POTS could be easy, with a
little knowledge of Linux drivers.
Get an older box (P2 400 or so), with plenty
of PCI slots, and preferrably an onboard NIC also.
Get some Winmodems equal to the # of pci slots.
WinModems, even in all of their
Microsoft-sponsored godless evil towards open
source platforms, are basically A/D and D/A
converters hooked to a phone jack. It should
be relatively simple to talk (no pun intended) to
them in software and
use one as an interface to POTS. It has all
of the neccesary hardware, and writing a sound
driver for it shouldn't be too difficult. A brand
of WinModem with fairly standard hardware could
be decided on by the implementer, and drivers
written for that. (Winmodems? Standard?...)
Client software with available source code could
be modified to use those, as well as control the
phone-line functions. Just run an instance per
WinModem.
Honestly, I think that this could work, and it
would be a great hack to accomplish. Anyone fancy
a go at it?
Remember 3dfx's GLIDE libraries? This could end up
like those... an "industry standard" supported only
by one manufacturer's chipsets, used by all major
games. At least 3dfx made good, cheap cards before
they died, though.
If it doesn't work with my RADEON, it must be evil!
You could reply in a format generally recognized
as BOFH-originated...
lUSER: Why is my machine so slow in the mornings?
You: You're slow until you get coffee, right?
lUSER: Yeah... but I thought...
You: Well, the simplest way is to pour coffee into the computer's mouth! It'll perk right up!
lUSER: Where's the mouth?
You: It's more of a grate - the holes on top of your monitor.
lUSER: Oh, I remember now... *wanders off*
This could have so much potential. Ruggedize and
waterproof it, add a built-in loudspeaker, and get
a circle of friends together for some hackey-sack.
Imagine the breakbeats you could pump out with a
few good hackers (of the hackey-sack variety)...
Forgive me, but wouldn't NOT buying a product that
a company is losing money on cause them to make
money? And yes, in my world, two wrongs do make
a right.
I have a Maxtor drive, a somewhat older model. I
can't get the model number because it's wedged so
tightly in my small case that I would literally have
to Dremel it out or disassemble the ENTIRE case,
including rivets to get at it - imagine the heat
buildup in there...
It's a 5400RPM 20gb model, late 2000 at least, most
likely a 1999 model. It has been dropped, stepped
on, kicked, formatted, overheated, dropped while
on and transferring data, and squashed while on
(as it currently is). It still holds my main
system files (XP) and has done so ever since I
bought it. SMART hasn't thrown up an error yet,
and no bad sectors have come through.
I'd buy another one, if I wanted an old, slow,
small drive. For now, I'll have to be content
with my RAID-0 array of 4x Seagate Barracuda ATA
IV 80GB 7200RPM drives (ST380021A). mmm... storage
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really, really unhappy at the quality control behind hard drives. Just this morning I put my foot on my 20gb Maxtor ATA66 old-and-showing-it drive. I barely set it on there and had only gotten comfortable with it as a foot rest when it made a funny noise and shut down! (No joke, I am this stupid and this did happen, and this isn't the first time.) Damn Maxtor, can't make a drive that head-crashes properly! Anyway, it still works, because it booted the Windows .NET Enterprise Server beta that this message is being typed on...
<BOFH> Next time, I should really put it to the test. Rubber panel-beating mallet: leaves almost no marks while causing a head crash...</BOFH>
Back when I ran Linux, I compiled everything from source. I had KDE3, several flavors of the DRI project, GLIDE (yes, I had a Voodoo3), 2 revisions of the kernel at all times, everything down to my sound drivers (ALSA) were kept in /usr/src. I wondered why I was out of disk space. So, I deleted the whole directory (system working fine for a day - must not need to recompile anymore). Low and behold, 10 gigs free!
I second the power supply idea. A bad power supply caused Windowz 2k, which is the most stable Windows to date (yeah, windows, stable...), to freeze 2 minutes from bootup. It then proceeded to fry my Radeon 8500. Now, I RMA'd the Radeon and popped in an SIS card - it starts exhibiting the same behavior. Swapped my power supply out, and everything but the video card starts working properly (fried it partially, I guess)...
The guy at the computer shop showed a machine running an Athlon with 16 hard drives in it off of a 350w power supply - plenty to convince me that mine (4.47v line anyone? perhaps 12.56v) was defective.
Anyways, when in doubt, new power supplies are cheap and replacing something can make you feel better. (especially when you smash the old one with an 8lb sledge!)
I'm probably wrong about this, but here goes...
That might work for about 30 seconds before it exploded. It would be very, very hard to charge the system first - pour gas into a header tank? You'd need some special high-pressure lines and a bit more structually sound attachment system than a couple of zip-ties. The gas, once it expanded from the heat, would blow apart the system long before it reached the radiator.
Do you still have the negatives? Nikon makes some very, very nice (and fairly expensive) negative scanners - some will even feed a strip through automagically and dump each picture to a file. They hook up via SCSI. I used one of these (a cheaper version, 1 negative at a time) to scan about 200 pictures and 300 slides at one point, and it made the task very easy.
Don't be afraid to sell strange things. While most people will buy a whitebox and a copy of Windows for Dummies, there are the exceptions (geeks). Stock cold-cathode lights and window mod kits (a few of each). You can still sell some of these specialty items to regular people (as another poster mentioned) - the artsy or futuristic-deco people might like an aluminum cube instead of a plasticy tower for a case.
Keep that dead motherboard that the manufacturer won't take back or that P166 you got on a trade-in - some people (mainly me, but there might be others) need those for one thing or another. Ever try to find an RTC chip with a battery soldered to it? It can be pulled from that dead mobo that you just threw away.
Be sure not to invest yourself heavily into software - I know of two types of purchasers for the latest 'Winderz.' Those who go to Wal-mart, and those who pick up a Warez release. Don't bet your business on a third type coming into the picture - it's unlikely to happen.
Have a good return policy. Sometimes you'll sell a dud, but the customer will keep coming back if you take it and hand them a new one with no hassle. It will take a bit of your time to get it back for a manufacturer's RMA, but it's worth the extra business from a satisfied customer.
Sell higher-end parts. Let the customer know that their onboard shared-memory AGP won't cut it for that copy of Doom 3 in their hand (assuming you ignored my previous point about software), and offer them the choice of a GeForce 5 or a Radeon 10000. Offer also to install it and configure the drivers - even the simplest of choices can throw a user for a loop (or a BSOD). I personally would rather buy my stuff locally, because I have had some bad experiences with internet retailers recently.
If someone comes in inquiring about a NIC, or a "networking kit," offer the service of installing a small network in their home. Odds are that you'll catch a demi-poweruser who wants to have two machines on the cable modem at the same time, and who can set up his own network. However, you'll occasionally run into someone who can't understand the concept of an IP address, and this is where you come in. Just don't overcommit yourself, and don't get them started on the idea of having you install network cables in their walls...
Have cool stuff in the store. Let someone come in and try your latest gamerz machine with a preloaded copy of Jedi Outcast up and running, or allow them to stare at the window-modded fileserver tower, with a terabyte of disk and all those spinning fans and blinking lights. If people like your store for the amusement value as well as the products, they'll come back more often. I have two choices of local stores - a dusty old hole in the wall with a dog that tries to rape your foot whenever you come in, or a newer store with machines up and running, just waiting to be crashed^Wplayed with. Which do you think I'd choose?
Anyway, enough rambling...
There is something wrong with that - Go see Penny Arcade for a good example of what it has done to [Gabe or Tycho, I don't remember which...]
I happen to be 15. Go into any of my friends' houses, and you'll see white boxes galore. All of my friends build their own systems, and most of them build systems for their families.
Out of the many computers in my house, only 2 are brand-name: A cheap celeron HP, because it was laying around and I needed one for my mom, and a Dell workstation, because it was a cast-off from my dad's company (complete with 19" monitor). He runs a whitebox P2, and it does all of his Word, Excel, and Outlook virus-executing goodness with ease.
Our firewall is my old K6/2-400, not really a whitebox, more of a collection of parts on a shelf! My friend's firewall has its power supply where its drive bays used to be, because its an ATX motherboard in an AT case, and the major structural member in it is a Learn Mariachi Now record (record - n. Vinyl disc, usually about 12" diameter, used for recording music by the variation of height in grooves on the surface).
Another friend of mine has a Dell, but only because his parents didn't trust him with $900 worth of computer parts unless a trained screwdriver-monkey put it together, and amazingly enough it works (albeit slowly).
Tell me again why whiteboxes are not out "in the wild?" I seem to have missed your point...
6 months ago, I had a similar system: K6/2 400, 128m RAM, ISA SBPRO sound, Voodoo3 2000, 4x CD, dust-choked floppy, 20gb drive.
Now, after spending less than $1000, I have a completely new system. I wouldn't exactly call it a white box, as it's built inside of a (purple) broken SGI Iris Indigo's shell. It is a K7-1400mHz T-Bird, 512mb DDR, 20gb primary + 300gb IDE RAID, ATI Radeon 8500 64mb, nice video capture card, 300w ATX power supply that is dying, CD burner, DVD drive. A similar system would've cost a hell of a lot more than $1000 when I bought most of the stuff a few months ago, and it wouldn't look nearly as neat! Also, it wouldn't be as upgradable. Now, if only I hadn't bought that $%!@*# VIA motherboard that is incompatible with Radeons (STOP error, anyone?)
I have built many computers, for myself and friends, and have only once fried a component accidentally - a 2gb Seagate that was connected to a faulty power supply (so I guess that makes 2 things, as I threw the power supply on the floor until it failed).
However, my friend runs a server (similar to mine) in his closet, and it went through 3 (yes, 3) Linksys NICs from Office Depot. They were similar chipsets and board designs, but they weren't from the same lot - the purchases were spaced out over a few months. He popped a couple of RealTeks in there and it works fine. However, the Linksys cards proved to fail somewhat more dramatically outside of a computer.
Hint: Take a Cat5 cable, cut it in half and strip the bare ends of the wires, twist the TX+ and RX+ together, and the TX- and RX- together. Take the two twisted sets, and attach to 12v jump starter (or 120vAC line). Repeat as necessary. Video camera recommended for ultimate wow-factor-capturing. One actually failed by catching on fire! Now that's what I call a collision...
You think a Dell is hard to expand? I had an (admittedly older) NEC computer, which was top of the line for its day. It had 3 bays in it. There was the standard CD bay, occupied. It had a bay with non-standard screw holes and some plastic doodads for the floppy drive. The hard drive bay was a 5 1/4" drive bay that was about as tall as a 3 1/2" bay, with a nonstandard screw pattern, taken up by a "Quantum Bigfoot" drive. Just try and upgrade that without some major Dremel work!
If you want a prebuilt dual Athlon, look at Alienware's Professional lines. They have a Dual Athlon base system that you can configure to your likings, and you can get a lot for $3000 from them. Plus it's color-coordinated!
Disclaimer: I have never bought or used an Alienware system.
I have bought plenty of stuff from NewEgg. The most recent purchase was 4x 80gb 7200rpm Seagate drives (no, I don't really need that much storage), and 256mb of generic RAM. I convinced a friend that PC2400 generic was much better than his PC2100 Crucial stick, and now I have 256mb of non-generic RAM (and his computer still works :-P ). I would definately buy from them again.
The only strange thing was that they shipped the hard drives in one box, and the RAM and a couple IDE cables in another box. Oh well, they arrived on the same day.
However, you fail to realize that the thumbprint is the whole idea! Just think. Multiple read passes coupled with the subchannel data to reconstruct the disc's information, compared to the errors on the disc, would give the player an exact image of your thumbprint! It would then upload this via cellular modem, if you were playing a burned disc, and the RIAA would come and rape you!
Taking the bait hook, line, and sinker, but here goes...
What you fail to mention is the price difference. Is spending the time to use Linux camera access software (SANE maybe, or just emulate a storage device) worth the $200 you'll save by not buying XP?
Better yet, just buy the mandrake box and install a pirated copy of 98se dual-booted on it. You'll have a fairly stable gaming OS (98) and a very stable everything-else OS (Mandrake). In the mean time, you won't have to pay the MSFT tax, thus saving you money. Just don't let the BSA (Boy Scouts of America or Business Software Association, , take your pick) come by.
Lentium 4 (gave up good pricing for the rest of its life), I might actually care about Rambus. I say, screw them. They need to be seriously beaten for what they're trying to do to the memory industry. Long live DDR, and RAMBUS can suc^H^H^H, I mean die!!!
In other news, RAMBUS (RMBS (?)) sues Fisher Price for use of the color red and the word 'bus'.
More at 11.
"Lindows just works more like my Brain does."
I think that this is an inflammatory and degrading statement to those of us, me included, whose brains have been scientifically proven not to work at all.
Actually, Mac OS 7.6.1 was the last one to run on 68k hardware. I tried to install OS 8 on a 68040-based machine, and it barfed at me.
This is fine for intraoffice communication, but what about the real world? I think that a solution for connection VoIP -> POTS could be easy, with a little knowledge of Linux drivers.
...)
Get an older box (P2 400 or so), with plenty of PCI slots, and preferrably an onboard NIC also. Get some Winmodems equal to the # of pci slots.
WinModems, even in all of their Microsoft-sponsored godless evil towards open source platforms, are basically A/D and D/A converters hooked to a phone jack. It should be relatively simple to talk (no pun intended) to them in software and use one as an interface to POTS. It has all of the neccesary hardware, and writing a sound driver for it shouldn't be too difficult. A brand of WinModem with fairly standard hardware could be decided on by the implementer, and drivers written for that. (Winmodems? Standard?
Client software with available source code could be modified to use those, as well as control the phone-line functions. Just run an instance per WinModem.
Honestly, I think that this could work, and it would be a great hack to accomplish. Anyone fancy a go at it?
Remember 3dfx's GLIDE libraries? This could end up like those... an "industry standard" supported only by one manufacturer's chipsets, used by all major games. At least 3dfx made good, cheap cards before they died, though.
If it doesn't work with my RADEON, it must be evil!
You could reply in a format generally recognized as BOFH-originated...
lUSER: Why is my machine so slow in the mornings?
You: You're slow until you get coffee, right?
lUSER: Yeah... but I thought...
You: Well, the simplest way is to pour coffee into the computer's mouth! It'll perk right up!
lUSER: Where's the mouth?
You: It's more of a grate - the holes on top of your monitor.
lUSER: Oh, I remember now... *wanders off*
ZAP!
This could have so much potential. Ruggedize and waterproof it, add a built-in loudspeaker, and get a circle of friends together for some hackey-sack. Imagine the breakbeats you could pump out with a few good hackers (of the hackey-sack variety)...
...if you can't spill coffee on the important bits.
Forgive me, but wouldn't NOT buying a product that a company is losing money on cause them to make money?
And yes, in my world, two wrongs do make a right.
I have a Maxtor drive, a somewhat older model. I can't get the model number because it's wedged so tightly in my small case that I would literally have to Dremel it out or disassemble the ENTIRE case, including rivets to get at it - imagine the heat buildup in there... It's a 5400RPM 20gb model, late 2000 at least, most likely a 1999 model. It has been dropped, stepped on, kicked, formatted, overheated, dropped while on and transferring data, and squashed while on (as it currently is). It still holds my main system files (XP) and has done so ever since I bought it. SMART hasn't thrown up an error yet, and no bad sectors have come through. I'd buy another one, if I wanted an old, slow, small drive. For now, I'll have to be content with my RAID-0 array of 4x Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80GB 7200RPM drives (ST380021A). mmm... storage