No joke. Becides, with 52X CD-R drives out there, takes less than 2 min to burn 600megs, not to mention the cost of pennys!
I know, it's amazing how cheap CD burners are now. About 4 years ago a bought a Yamaha SCSI 8x4x24 CDRW drive for about $700 (plus SCSI card), recently it finally died, so I bought a LiteON 52x24x52 for $60! (These prices are Australian.)
More than 10 times cheaper and the drive is more than 6 times faster!
Admittedly, the Yamaha burnt probably about 1,000 CDR's and never, ever, burnt a coaster. The internal buffer was always pegged at 99%.
The internal buffer on the LiteON IDE sometimes starts looking a bit scarey (burn proof kicks in though), but then it's 6 times faster and the buffer is smaller.
Design and repair electronics devices (analog and digital, emphasis on digital), including electromechanical in military clean room environments, in a weapons capacity? Yes.
Do have anything of substance to actually say? Want to provide a specific argument? Or merely vaguely deride me like a loser?
Chill, dude. It was a joke. Not all Americans are as dumb as you seem to think we are.
That's cool. I know not all Americans are dumb. Just the ones on Springer and the ones who defend a president that got into power via the supreme court. ; )
I've worked with a lot of top US Navy engineering. A lot of my training was based on highest American standards. I really look up to NASA too.
I just don't see the point in retaining such a quirky measurement system, when the rest of the World has gone Metric.
This is coming from a guy who learned Metric at school, and then had to work on lots of high tech US equipment which used Imperial measurement systems. I hated it, as did every single other Aussie I knew, bar none.
I find US citizens tend to have a perception that we (jokers) are dumb. Which is not true. We are supposedly more University educated per capita, although we all know about stats.
Peace "friend". PS, we have been allies forever. We recently entered into "free" trade agreements with you, and what happened just weeks after that? You fucked us over big time in the sugar industry. Our Prime Minister came back to Australia (after attempts to negotiate some _fair_ trade in sugar and your corrupt sugar industry wants the whole enchilada), our PM basically said publically to our sugar farmers, "FIND ANOTHER INDUSTRY, WE CANNOT COMPETE WITH THE CORRUPT US SUGAR INDUSTRY" (not exact words, simply because I cannot remember them word for word, but this is not exagerated).
I think most hatred towards the USA, is well founded in realistic notions of how you treat the rest of the World. Are you our friends or what?
We put ourselves on Al Qaeda's shit list, by sending our own SAS to Afganistan and Iraq (we supposedly softened some Iraqi targets for you first, probably at your request) and sent further troops and you repay us by killing one of our prime industries!
Don't you already own most of our old Aussie brands? Is that not enough?
I know not all Americans are dumb, but a good percentage come across as arrogant arseholes. Flame me to hell and back if you want, but take into consideration that I am a reasonable person giving an honest perception of my own and every other Aussie I know. And I don't just mean friends for whome I might gravitate towards like minded people, but I mean even work collegues. I hear that Aussie's are popular in the US? I wonder if we would be if we spoke up real loud and obnoxiously (like a Yanky) and told you have we really feel.
Ah well, might pick one up on ebay. Been looking for a LS120/240 drive to replace my floppy.
Yeah, it's one of those things hey. It would be nice to have, saving 32MB on old floppies. But we're not going to ring around and run out tommorow to eagerly get one.
When I heard about them, I thought wow! For about a minute. Then realised, floppies suck. I'm happy to use them for throw away boot disks and util disks, but not important data. And for moving data from PC to PC, I would rather spend a few bucks on 2 cheap fast ethernet cards and a cross-over cable. ; )
Somehow, the thought of rather having a bunch of LS240's for all my machines, just doesn't appeal, compared with the network I already have, which would take about 5 seconds to transfer that much data.
I am just waiting for someone to check the detailed specs, which might state the total number of logical blocks available and then reply to me something like:
And I guess at the moment such a drive is not what I would call "inexpensive". YMMV.
The inexpensive bit, comes from long ago, when large (physically) disks (expensive and fast) could be replaced with many smaller (physically and logically) disks, which were slower and less expensive. The end effect may have been a similar cost, but reliability and performance went up.
Those large expensive disks are dinasaurs now, so one side of the comparison that is often implied with a word like "inexpensive", is now gone.
I can't remember. Was it inexpensive first or independent?
...except that the disks aren't independent. The whole point of RAID is that the disks are closly dependednt on each other.
I would say the opposite. The disks are not dependent on each other individually, because they can afford to loose one or maybe more disks, depending on the RAID level. They are dependent on not loosing more than they need to work.
So they don't depend on each other, they depend on the group which they comprise, minus a certain allowable failure tolerance and the algorithm used which allows them to suffer loss of a physical disk.
In fact, they are independent of each other to a certain extent, because data is redundantly distributed across them in such a way that it can exist by looking at any combination of all the drives minus one (for example). When a group can work without a member and vice versa, that's indepentent in my book.
With the exception of "RAID 0" of course, which is an oxymoron.
We could argue all day, since it's borderline on subjective perception. However, it really comes down to what RAID level we are talking about.
RAID 0: Completely dependent on each other. RAID 1: Completely independent of each other. RAID 5: Independent of each other to a certain extent, depending on configuration (dependent on the whole minus (typically) any one, yet not dependent on any particular individual while the array is completely functional).
And it only puts out 7200 rpm. Each of my 100 gig harddrives put out that. Hmm.
Maybe they will release a 10,000 rpm version and push it to it's ATA100 limit.
A cautionary note however, this drive has 5 platters! Which means less reliability due to greater complexity. The last time an IBM/Hitachi drive had 5 platters was.... the 75GXP! :/
Hell, I'd walk naked in the snow for fifty football fields if it meant not having to use the metric system. Yup, I'm proud to be an American.
Are you proud when the US loose a NASA space craft, en route to Mars, because Imperial and Metric measurements were used in the same design and one measurement got interpretted as the other?
And was that the fault of a system of measurement or an American?
What's wrong with metric? Is it too damn simple? Or is it just pride that you don't want to touch it?
I've got one of those in my Dell too. It's louder than hell when it's powered up though and I've been meaning to toss it for a nice Maxtor drive. I'm glad IBM got out of the drive business because their stuff sucked.
Well, they had a series of bad drives. I wouldn't say IBM's stuff sucks though. I've had a Travelstar (which I bought to upgrade my Thinkpad) for years now. No problems. And I've used very many Dell notebooks, Thinkpads are way better built.
It's funny how people get burned baddly at some stage by a particular make and then swear off that make for life. For me, that make is Maxtor.
The fluid bearings would eventually leak (oil), which would make it's way across the disk platter thanks the centrifugal force. Disks spin fast, heads hover just over the disk (extremely close, as in, much closer than the thickness of a human hair) due to the airflow created by the spinning, a droplet of oil on the disk impacts into a head that's not designed to take direct impact of that magnitude. Especially not a huge impact like that from oil attached to a very fast spinning disk, with lots of inertia. BANG! Something that is at the mercy of extremely microscopically tight tolerances gets belted right where those tolerances matter the most! Your data might still be on the disk, but one or more of the heads are now useless.
Loosing oil out of your fluid bearings can't be great either, since it is the oil that is the actual bearing itself.
PS, I worked in gyro compass/stabilizers in a military role during the 80's. I heard that the F-16's gyro bearings were actually individual air molecules! The sleeve and shaft were built to such incredibly high tolerances that there was just enough space between them to use air as the bearings! I thought this was incredible, until they were replaced with fully solid state gyros based on lasers (measuring slight changes in 3 laser beams comprising 3 axis as the aircraft would move around)!
Then IBM issued a firmware upgrade; some suspected the upgrade kept heads moving during idle time to keep them from colliding into each other. Who knows?
Heads coliding into each other? Highly unlikely. Ever pulled an old broken HDD apart? They are practically fused together on an offset arm that allows them to "clamp" one or more platters. One arm moves them all. There might be some drives with more than one set of heads/arms, but I don't know of one yet and if it did exist, shirley they would not be able to hit each other. Be great to reduce latency and access times. Especially if they each only serviced a half of the disk each. SCSI TCQ would love that.
-- There's no reason to become alarmed, and we hope you enjoy the rest of your flight. By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?
Thing is that we tried it with three seperate disks, and while the data was able to be read again, evey time we tried to format them in a normal floppy drive, it would come back with 90% bad sectors. Though we really didn't have much time to play with it, only messed with it for about an hour before it went on the floor.
Wow. I wonder what it can be doing to those disks?
Do you have a Unix-like (got to be careful, SCO might sue me!:) machine at work that you can try to erase this disk with?
With something like dd bs=512 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rfd0c
The of=/dev/rfd0c might be different depending on the OS being used (I use OpenBSD).
Maybe then you can format it. My thinking, is that the special encoding that that drive is doing (to format to 32MB), might look like sectors marked bad, when if fact they're not.
Your tech guy seems to be on the right track, but a little mistaken. The LS-240 is RW. For 1.44MB floppies, 1.44MB floppies formatted to 32MB, 120MB LS-120 "superdisks" and 240MB LS-240 floppy disks.
He is correct in stating that you write to the 32MB formatted floppies as you would a CDR (setting what files to put on an image and then writing that image to disk), however it does support rewriting through writing the whole modified image again...
In my home state of New South Wales, it is illegal to be carrying a knife without a reasonable excuse such as 'the lawful pursuit of the person's occupation'. I got me a reasonable excuse now!
NSW is also my home state. However I carry a cut throat razor and a Colt.45 semi auto. I got me a reasonable excuse too!...
I'm a hit man.
Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again
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Recovering Secret HD Space
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· Score: 2, Informative
I would feel pretty confident that it's an error in some part of their distribution/quality control... maybe something as simple as a barcode incorrectly put into the database or something of that sort.
I might beleive this for our single case. But having seen a post of it happening elsewhere, I would tend to beleive that their profit margins are good enough for them to occasionally just take a little less profit to keep the customer happy. Especially on something like a rack mount server (1650), which might indicate to Dell that this customer could potentially buy more server gear and maybe even pallet loads of desktop gear during the next desktop upgrade session.
What else do you think these companies use the company info forms that you fill out for? If you filled out that you are an "ISP" then they might be less inclined to "make you happy" as they would had you filled out "legal firm" with "500-1000 staff". Cha ching! To them, keeping the IT department and purchasing happy is merely an investment for their (Dell) future.
PS, I don't know why I thought this happened in another country, I don't seem to be able to see anything in that post to make me beleive that. I'm sure I read more than this but can find it right now. Perhaps it went off list, I can't recall.
if you had to load a tsr it might be a compression reading scheme like what ms dos had way back..
Ahhh, the good old DriveSpace/DoubleSpace, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22 fiasco's!
True, a TSR might indicate a compression scheme being used, however it's worth noting, to avoid any confusion to others who don't know, that DMF did not use compression. MS did however use their.cab files on these larger DMF formatted disks.
Microsoft just keep pushing the boundaries of law and moving well past moral boundaries and still there are MS fanboys willing to stick uo for them, in the face of overwhelming evidence.
I was working for the Australian Stock Exchange in the mid 90's, during 1997 I think it was, I started to see Compaq machines coming with these as standard.
If you turn an LS120 disk upside down, open the protective slide and look at the disk, you can actually see the hard sectoring guides as physical bumps!
Special disks were required to store 120MB and they most certainly were not WORM, they were RW magnetic media all the way.
Flopticals were similar from a consumer standpoint, but they were magneto-optical like minidiscs, whereby a laser would have to heat the magnetic surface to "curie (?) point" before the magnetic info could be changed.
You sure they weren't just seeing Hyper-threading enabled?
No, the package contents revealed dual, so in absolute astonishement, I and another tech opened them up to find TWO CPU's.
I'll see if I can find the OpenBSD mailing list link if you like. Although it's past my bed time (Sydney, Au) and I've got work tomorrow, so you might have to wait for it.
I don't know what the reason was behind getting 2 for the price of 1 was, I was merely speculating there. But we most certainly did get 3 dual procs for the price of 3 singles. And a mailing message I saw described exactly our experience in this regard, within days of it happening to us, but on another continent outside of Au.
Yes. I call it corrupting your partition table. ; )
Years ago, when an 800MB drive was "big", a friend of mine tried to convince myself and a group of IT staff friends, that he could get around BIOS limits of a particular DEC workstation, through some tricky settings of the geometry in the BIOS. LBA was not big in those days and MS OS were still using the BIOS for disk access beyond the boot process.
Anyway, my friend managed to "trick" the BIOS into seeing 800MB (previously 504MB).
So, in an attempt to prove him wrong, I then proceeded to format the drive. MS-DOS format claimed it was formatting the drive as 800MB, but this did not deter me. I knew that MS-DOS was simply fooled into thinking that 800MB was actually addressable on that particular (504MB through BIOS limited) machine.
The format completed fine! But I was still not detered. I said, "ok, now we start to fill this drive up...".
I started copying a large directory over and over to fill the drive. When we approached about 500MB... "Seek error: sector not found.". The drive no longer booted either.
What had happened, was that we managed to force the BIOS to accept geometry values which it could not fully address. Most Significant Bits which MS-DOS would send, would never get seen by the drive, since the BIOS could not go beyond a certain address width. So while formatting, MS-DOS would be sending write commands which would be honored by the drive, but the BIOS would be passively stripping some of the highest MSB's out of shere lack of support of them.
The end effect, was that at the 504MB point, the drive head would be about 504MB's in to the 800MB, then at 505MB, the address would go back to zero and the head would come back to the start! That first sector would be formatted again, the drive would report success, and MS-DOS format would think nothing of it. When it got to "800MB", it would have all appeared to format ok to MS-DOS.
The end result was an 800MB drive, with a partition table which that BIOS was never going to be able to fully service, even though MS-DOS format "saw the proof" that all was fine. ; ) When someone tried to copy data to the next "safe" sector beyond what the BIOS could address, what they were actually doing was writing back over the beginning of the disk! Corrupting the partition table.
; )
I was delighted, because everyone else was on my friends side, even though one of my buddies also had a background in electronics and should have known what I was talking about. Anyway, modern drives DO have secret areas set aside for remapping of bad sectors (to give you the consumer the perception of zero bad sectors and all the space you legally purchased), but this space is way smaller than what these jokers are claiming and it is normally not user accessible.
So, save yourself the hassle of wondering in a few months time, why your drive has "crashed". You might not remember the "magic" that you did to your drive.
Re:I was thinking first it was just bad DELL again
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Recovering Secret HD Space
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Dells wich has only a portion of their HD partioned.
A few months back (in Sydney at least), if you purchased particular uni-processor Dell rackmount gear (1650's from memory?), dell would send you dual-processors and charge you for the uni.
I guess they might loose more money throwing a spanner into "their high speed money making machine". Perhaps just selling the next closest thing up is more cost effective for them.
I saw this confirmed for other continents I beleive in the OpenBSD mailing lists, so it wasn't just a stuff up with our 3 orders.
Yes, and those tools made it harder to explain why 1 meg was physically impossible.
Careful with the word impossible! Years ago, when I was learning electronics, the widely accepted maximum PSTN MODEM download speed was 9,600bps at 2,400 baud.
56k MODEM's still operate at 2,400 baud to this day, yet achieve so many times more than 9,600bps through tricky new techniques and removal of old hurdles.
I know what you mean though. Just pushing a head further than it is supposed to go is not always going to work. On something like an Atari, which has pretty consistent hardware, it might never work.
(By the 99 track method, at least.)
And there is your disclaimer! ; )
BTW, I beleive I have seen a Panasonic floppy drive advertised which claims to get 32MB from standard 1.44MB floppy disks using an encoding technology different from that typically used with floppies.
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How about an OpenBSD firewall guide book, eh?
Some books. The first two are appropriate, however Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls is really out of date.
The FAQ. Is very nice.
Or the best reference there is! Constantly up to date. Print it out, read it, use PF, never ever look back.
Especially on your fully state synced redundant PF firewalls.
No joke. Becides, with 52X CD-R drives out there, takes less than 2 min to burn 600megs, not to mention the cost of pennys!
I know, it's amazing how cheap CD burners are now. About 4 years ago a bought a Yamaha SCSI 8x4x24 CDRW drive for about $700 (plus SCSI card), recently it finally died, so I bought a LiteON 52x24x52 for $60! (These prices are Australian.)
More than 10 times cheaper and the drive is more than 6 times faster!
Admittedly, the Yamaha burnt probably about 1,000 CDR's and never, ever, burnt a coaster. The internal buffer was always pegged at 99%.
The internal buffer on the LiteON IDE sometimes starts looking a bit scarey (burn proof kicks in though), but then it's 6 times faster and the buffer is smaller.
Never designed disk drives eh?
No.
Design and repair electronics devices (analog and digital, emphasis on digital), including electromechanical in military clean room environments, in a weapons capacity? Yes.
Do have anything of substance to actually say? Want to provide a specific argument? Or merely vaguely deride me like a loser?
Chill, dude. It was a joke. Not all Americans are as dumb as you seem to think we are.
That's cool. I know not all Americans are dumb. Just the ones on Springer and the ones who defend a president that got into power via the supreme court. ; )
I've worked with a lot of top US Navy engineering. A lot of my training was based on highest American standards. I really look up to NASA too.
I just don't see the point in retaining such a quirky measurement system, when the rest of the World has gone Metric.
This is coming from a guy who learned Metric at school, and then had to work on lots of high tech US equipment which used Imperial measurement systems. I hated it, as did every single other Aussie I knew, bar none.
I find US citizens tend to have a perception that we (jokers) are dumb. Which is not true. We are supposedly more University educated per capita, although we all know about stats.
Peace "friend". PS, we have been allies forever. We recently entered into "free" trade agreements with you, and what happened just weeks after that? You fucked us over big time in the sugar industry. Our Prime Minister came back to Australia (after attempts to negotiate some _fair_ trade in sugar and your corrupt sugar industry wants the whole enchilada), our PM basically said publically to our sugar farmers, "FIND ANOTHER INDUSTRY, WE CANNOT COMPETE WITH THE CORRUPT US SUGAR INDUSTRY" (not exact words, simply because I cannot remember them word for word, but this is not exagerated).
I think most hatred towards the USA, is well founded in realistic notions of how you treat the rest of the World. Are you our friends or what?
We put ourselves on Al Qaeda's shit list, by sending our own SAS to Afganistan and Iraq (we supposedly softened some Iraqi targets for you first, probably at your request) and sent further troops and you repay us by killing one of our prime industries!
Don't you already own most of our old Aussie brands? Is that not enough?
I know not all Americans are dumb, but a good percentage come across as arrogant arseholes. Flame me to hell and back if you want, but take into consideration that I am a reasonable person giving an honest perception of my own and every other Aussie I know. And I don't just mean friends for whome I might gravitate towards like minded people, but I mean even work collegues. I hear that Aussie's are popular in the US? I wonder if we would be if we spoke up real loud and obnoxiously (like a Yanky) and told you have we really feel.
Ah well, might pick one up on ebay. Been looking for a LS120/240 drive to replace my floppy.
Yeah, it's one of those things hey. It would be nice to have, saving 32MB on old floppies. But we're not going to ring around and run out tommorow to eagerly get one.
When I heard about them, I thought wow! For about a minute. Then realised, floppies suck. I'm happy to use them for throw away boot disks and util disks, but not important data. And for moving data from PC to PC, I would rather spend a few bucks on 2 cheap fast ethernet cards and a cross-over cable. ; )
Somehow, the thought of rather having a bunch of LS240's for all my machines, just doesn't appeal, compared with the network I already have, which would take about 5 seconds to transfer that much data.
woops :-)
; )
I am just waiting for someone to check the detailed specs, which might state the total number of logical blocks available and then reply to me something like:
Actually, to be accurate, it's 372.6 GBs.
And I guess at the moment such a drive is not what I would call "inexpensive". YMMV.
The inexpensive bit, comes from long ago, when large (physically) disks (expensive and fast) could be replaced with many smaller (physically and logically) disks, which were slower and less expensive. The end effect may have been a similar cost, but reliability and performance went up.
Those large expensive disks are dinasaurs now, so one side of the comparison that is often implied with a word like "inexpensive", is now gone.
I can't remember. Was it inexpensive first or independent?
...except that the disks aren't independent. The whole point of RAID is that the disks are closly dependednt on each other.
I would say the opposite. The disks are not dependent on each other individually, because they can afford to loose one or maybe more disks, depending on the RAID level. They are dependent on not loosing more than they need to work.
So they don't depend on each other, they depend on the group which they comprise, minus a certain allowable failure tolerance and the algorithm used which allows them to suffer loss of a physical disk.
In fact, they are independent of each other to a certain extent, because data is redundantly distributed across them in such a way that it can exist by looking at any combination of all the drives minus one (for example). When a group can work without a member and vice versa, that's indepentent in my book.
With the exception of "RAID 0" of course, which is an oxymoron.
We could argue all day, since it's borderline on subjective perception. However, it really comes down to what RAID level we are talking about.
RAID 0: Completely dependent on each other.
RAID 1: Completely independent of each other.
RAID 5: Independent of each other to a certain extent, depending on configuration (dependent on the whole minus (typically) any one, yet not dependent on any particular individual while the array is completely functional).
And it only puts out 7200 rpm. Each of my 100 gig harddrives put out that. Hmm.
/
Maybe they will release a 10,000 rpm version and push it to it's ATA100 limit.
A cautionary note however, this drive has 5 platters! Which means less reliability due to greater complexity. The last time an IBM/Hitachi drive had 5 platters was.... the 75GXP! :
Be afraid, be very afraid!
at there very least, it would be accurate.
Check your numbers before talking about accuracy!
those 400 GBs are actualy 390.6 GBs
Actually, to be accurate, it's 372.5 GBs.
1k byte = 1,024 bytes.
1M byte = 1,024 * 1,024 bytes or 1,048,576 bytes.
1G byte = 1,024 * 1,024 * 1,024 bytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes.
Hell, I'd walk naked in the snow for fifty football fields if it meant not having to use the metric system. Yup, I'm proud to be an American.
Are you proud when the US loose a NASA space craft, en route to Mars, because Imperial and Metric measurements were used in the same design and one measurement got interpretted as the other?
And was that the fault of a system of measurement or an American?
What's wrong with metric? Is it too damn simple? Or is it just pride that you don't want to touch it?
I've got one of those in my Dell too. It's louder than hell when it's powered up though and I've been meaning to toss it for a nice Maxtor drive. I'm glad IBM got out of the drive business because their stuff sucked.
Well, they had a series of bad drives. I wouldn't say IBM's stuff sucks though. I've had a Travelstar (which I bought to upgrade my Thinkpad) for years now. No problems. And I've used very many Dell notebooks, Thinkpads are way better built.
It's funny how people get burned baddly at some stage by a particular make and then swear off that make for life. For me, that make is Maxtor.
I realise the Deathstar issue was huge though.
Some suspected a design flaw.
The fluid bearings would eventually leak (oil), which would make it's way across the disk platter thanks the centrifugal force. Disks spin fast, heads hover just over the disk (extremely close, as in, much closer than the thickness of a human hair) due to the airflow created by the spinning, a droplet of oil on the disk impacts into a head that's not designed to take direct impact of that magnitude. Especially not a huge impact like that from oil attached to a very fast spinning disk, with lots of inertia. BANG! Something that is at the mercy of extremely microscopically tight tolerances gets belted right where those tolerances matter the most! Your data might still be on the disk, but one or more of the heads are now useless.
Loosing oil out of your fluid bearings can't be great either, since it is the oil that is the actual bearing itself.
PS, I worked in gyro compass/stabilizers in a military role during the 80's. I heard that the F-16's gyro bearings were actually individual air molecules! The sleeve and shaft were built to such incredibly high tolerances that there was just enough space between them to use air as the bearings! I thought this was incredible, until they were replaced with fully solid state gyros based on lasers (measuring slight changes in 3 laser beams comprising 3 axis as the aircraft would move around)!
Then IBM issued a firmware upgrade; some suspected the upgrade kept heads moving during idle time to keep them from colliding into each other. Who knows?
Heads coliding into each other? Highly unlikely. Ever pulled an old broken HDD apart? They are practically fused together on an offset arm that allows them to "clamp" one or more platters. One arm moves them all. There might be some drives with more than one set of heads/arms, but I don't know of one yet and if it did exist, shirley they would not be able to hit each other. Be great to reduce latency and access times. Especially if they each only serviced a half of the disk each. SCSI TCQ would love that.
--
There's no reason to become alarmed, and we hope you enjoy the rest of your flight. By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?
Thing is that we tried it with three seperate disks, and while the data was able to be read again, evey time we tried to format them in a normal floppy drive, it would come back with 90% bad sectors. Though we really didn't have much time to play with it, only messed with it for about an hour before it went on the floor.
Wow. I wonder what it can be doing to those disks?
Do you have a Unix-like (got to be careful, SCO might sue me!:) machine at work that you can try to erase this disk with?
With something like dd bs=512 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rfd0c
The of=/dev/rfd0c might be different depending on the OS being used (I use OpenBSD).
Maybe then you can format it. My thinking, is that the special encoding that that drive is doing (to format to 32MB), might look like sectors marked bad, when if fact they're not.
Cya.
Your tech guy seems to be on the right track, but a little mistaken. The LS-240 is RW. For 1.44MB floppies, 1.44MB floppies formatted to 32MB, 120MB LS-120 "superdisks" and 240MB LS-240 floppy disks.
He is correct in stating that you write to the 32MB formatted floppies as you would a CDR (setting what files to put on an image and then writing that image to disk), however it does support rewriting through writing the whole modified image again...
Panasonic LS-240.
I am not convinced that you cannot formatted the disk back to 1.44MB.
I don't know how they could get 32 MB.
Panason LS-240 does it.
In my home state of New South Wales, it is illegal to be carrying a knife without a reasonable excuse such as 'the lawful pursuit of the person's occupation'. I got me a reasonable excuse now!
.45 semi auto. I got me a reasonable excuse too!...
NSW is also my home state. However I carry a cut throat razor and a Colt
I'm a hit man.
I would feel pretty confident that it's an error in some part of their distribution/quality control... maybe something as simple as a barcode incorrectly put into the database or something of that sort.
:) No doubt cleaning out stock for the new 3Ghz chips."
I might beleive this for our single case. But having seen a post of it happening elsewhere, I would tend to beleive that their profit margins are good enough for them to occasionally just take a little less profit to keep the customer happy. Especially on something like a rack mount server (1650), which might indicate to Dell that this customer could potentially buy more server gear and maybe even pallet loads of desktop gear during the next desktop upgrade session.
What else do you think these companies use the company info forms that you fill out for? If you filled out that you are an "ISP" then they might be less inclined to "make you happy" as they would had you filled out "legal firm" with "500-1000 staff". Cha ching! To them, keeping the IT department and purchasing happy is merely an investment for their (Dell) future.
Here is that mailing list post that I promised...
"Thanks, turns out to be a usless question now though, Dell is throwing in second CPU's for free
PS, I don't know why I thought this happened in another country, I don't seem to be able to see anything in that post to make me beleive that. I'm sure I read more than this but can find it right now. Perhaps it went off list, I can't recall.
if you had to load a tsr it might be a compression reading scheme like what ms dos had way back..
.cab files on these larger DMF formatted disks.
Ahhh, the good old DriveSpace/DoubleSpace, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22 fiasco's!
True, a TSR might indicate a compression scheme being used, however it's worth noting, to avoid any confusion to others who don't know, that DMF did not use compression. MS did however use their
Microsoft just keep pushing the boundaries of law and moving well past moral boundaries and still there are MS fanboys willing to stick uo for them, in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Yea, we had a 120LS drive here by panasonic.
Are you talking about LS120 drives?
I was working for the Australian Stock Exchange in the mid 90's, during 1997 I think it was, I started to see Compaq machines coming with these as standard.
If you turn an LS120 disk upside down, open the protective slide and look at the disk, you can actually see the hard sectoring guides as physical bumps!
Special disks were required to store 120MB and they most certainly were not WORM, they were RW magnetic media all the way.
Flopticals were similar from a consumer standpoint, but they were magneto-optical like minidiscs, whereby a laser would have to heat the magnetic surface to "curie (?) point" before the magnetic info could be changed.
You sure they weren't just seeing Hyper-threading enabled?
No, the package contents revealed dual, so in absolute astonishement, I and another tech opened them up to find TWO CPU's.
I'll see if I can find the OpenBSD mailing list link if you like. Although it's past my bed time (Sydney, Au) and I've got work tomorrow, so you might have to wait for it.
I don't know what the reason was behind getting 2 for the price of 1 was, I was merely speculating there. But we most certainly did get 3 dual procs for the price of 3 singles. And a mailing message I saw described exactly our experience in this regard, within days of it happening to us, but on another continent outside of Au.
Sorry, but this is complete bullshit.
Yes. I call it corrupting your partition table. ; )
Years ago, when an 800MB drive was "big", a friend of mine tried to convince myself and a group of IT staff friends, that he could get around BIOS limits of a particular DEC workstation, through some tricky settings of the geometry in the BIOS. LBA was not big in those days and MS OS were still using the BIOS for disk access beyond the boot process.
Anyway, my friend managed to "trick" the BIOS into seeing 800MB (previously 504MB).
So, in an attempt to prove him wrong, I then proceeded to format the drive. MS-DOS format claimed it was formatting the drive as 800MB, but this did not deter me. I knew that MS-DOS was simply fooled into thinking that 800MB was actually addressable on that particular (504MB through BIOS limited) machine.
The format completed fine! But I was still not detered. I said, "ok, now we start to fill this drive up...".
I started copying a large directory over and over to fill the drive. When we approached about 500MB... "Seek error: sector not found.". The drive no longer booted either.
What had happened, was that we managed to force the BIOS to accept geometry values which it could not fully address. Most Significant Bits which MS-DOS would send, would never get seen by the drive, since the BIOS could not go beyond a certain address width. So while formatting, MS-DOS would be sending write commands which would be honored by the drive, but the BIOS would be passively stripping some of the highest MSB's out of shere lack of support of them.
The end effect, was that at the 504MB point, the drive head would be about 504MB's in to the 800MB, then at 505MB, the address would go back to zero and the head would come back to the start! That first sector would be formatted again, the drive would report success, and MS-DOS format would think nothing of it. When it got to "800MB", it would have all appeared to format ok to MS-DOS.
The end result was an 800MB drive, with a partition table which that BIOS was never going to be able to fully service, even though MS-DOS format "saw the proof" that all was fine. ; ) When someone tried to copy data to the next "safe" sector beyond what the BIOS could address, what they were actually doing was writing back over the beginning of the disk! Corrupting the partition table.
; )
I was delighted, because everyone else was on my friends side, even though one of my buddies also had a background in electronics and should have known what I was talking about. Anyway, modern drives DO have secret areas set aside for remapping of bad sectors (to give you the consumer the perception of zero bad sectors and all the space you legally purchased), but this space is way smaller than what these jokers are claiming and it is normally not user accessible.
So, save yourself the hassle of wondering in a few months time, why your drive has "crashed". You might not remember the "magic" that you did to your drive.
Dells wich has only a portion of their HD partioned.
A few months back (in Sydney at least), if you purchased particular uni-processor Dell rackmount gear (1650's from memory?), dell would send you dual-processors and charge you for the uni.
I guess they might loose more money throwing a spanner into "their high speed money making machine". Perhaps just selling the next closest thing up is more cost effective for them.
I saw this confirmed for other continents I beleive in the OpenBSD mailing lists, so it wasn't just a stuff up with our 3 orders.
Yes, and those tools made it harder to explain why 1 meg was physically impossible.
Careful with the word impossible! Years ago, when I was learning electronics, the widely accepted maximum PSTN MODEM download speed was 9,600bps at 2,400 baud.
56k MODEM's still operate at 2,400 baud to this day, yet achieve so many times more than 9,600bps through tricky new techniques and removal of old hurdles.
I know what you mean though. Just pushing a head further than it is supposed to go is not always going to work. On something like an Atari, which has pretty consistent hardware, it might never work.
(By the 99 track method, at least.)
And there is your disclaimer! ; )
BTW, I beleive I have seen a Panasonic floppy drive advertised which claims to get 32MB from standard 1.44MB floppy disks using an encoding technology different from that typically used with floppies.
Microsoft developed tools to get 1.6 and 1.8MB out of a 1.44MB floppy.
DMF.