SCSI HD at HSC

[Devin Carraway]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2000 at 03:37:25PM -0100, Cal Herrmann wrote:
> In case anyone is interested, I asked HSC Computers in Rohnert Park 
> if they had any SCSI hard discs (they have many bargains, but mostly 
> PC); they have a double-height 2g for $30. They thought it was a 
> Seagate, but it identifies itself as a HP-C3010, seems very sturdy. 
> Anyway, it partitions, formats, reads and writes OK on my Mac. I am 
> trying it for installation of the SuSE PPC disk I got at the NBLUG 
> meeting last month (thanks!).  Working through some minor problems 
> (one screen is in German!), but it seems to work, YAST appears.

	One comment about buying used HDs -- often computer stuff either
works or doesn't out of the box, and if it does work it'll stay working for
a considerable period.  HDs don't seem to work that way -- they have a
substantially higher failure rate (moving parts) than most components, and
their failures can take a while to crop up.

	One way to attempt to find out is to put the drive in its expected
thermal environment, then run sequential large-file bonnie iterations on it
for a day or two.  Bonnie is a small free disk benchmark utility, which has
the useful side effect of being pretty hard on the drive -- end-to-end runs
on 1GB test files (the largest you can manage with an unpatched 32-bit x86
machine) can help show flaws before you commit any meaningful data to the
disk.


-- 
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