[Leica] I'm back and resubscribed

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

> The IBM disk have a way of braking down in the most devastating ways - we
> have had quite a few hardisk brake downs over the years but especially the
> IBMs have been a fortune to fix when we needed the data and had to send 
> them
> od to the data rescue company - the other disks - i think seagate mostly -
> all just had to have some small thing replaced and they were up and
> running - no idea why :-) - did i do my back up to day - yes even I learn
> from mistakes

This was exactly my experience. IBM disks, when they fail, fail suddenly and 
catastrophically and your data is gone forever. They also seem to be much 
more heat-sensitive than the other brands. I think that if you keep an IBM 
disk at 10 Celsius it is much less likely to fail.

The disk industry has all changed technology in the last 18 months. If you 
take apart a current-generation 160GB disk you will probably find just one 
platter inside. It used to take 4 or 5 platters to do the same thing. The 
newer technology was less reliable at first, but so much cheaper that all of 
the disk companies had to cut over to it at once. It's now pretty much 
stabilized.

Maxtor disks are fine unless you do a lot of reading from them. Writing they 
can handle, but if you spend 12 hours reading from a Maxtor disk with no 
let-up (as, say, a search engine like Google would be wont to do), the disk 
controller may well get so hot that it will desolder itself and some of the 
chips fall out.