On 2014-08-23 19:09, Per Jessen wrote:
Anton Aylward wrote:
Did those old, old drives do this? We don't remember; all we remember is that they lasted longer than than the Energizer Bunny.
I don't remember them doing it, and just the fact that I'm still employing 9.1Gb SCSI drives for swap space is a testament to their longevity. I frequently put a RAID1 of two 9.1Gb drives as swap space in older servers that still have U320 SCSI slots.
The first HD I bought, a 30 MB (32?) unit, came with a defect list on a glued label to the back. You had to call a program in the BIOS by starting "debug" from MsDOS, load directly the program counter with an address, and tell it to run. A menu appeared. Then you had to low level format the HD, decide on an interleave factor (something about 12 made my disk work way faster than the recommended value of 2 or 3 - yes, I tested all of them, one by one, from 1 to about 15), and enter the defect list. The defect list was a known list of bad sectors. Supposedly you marked them as bad, and the high level dos format would later skip them. Actually something failed, because Dos did detect those sectors as bad and mark them such in the FAT tables, so the BIOS marking did not work as supposed. So disks came with defects. But they seldom developed more. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)