Strange & nondeterministic behaviour of Maxtor 8760S

[Tatjana Heuser]

I'm using a brand-new Maxtor 8760S as System Disk for a Sun3/50 running
SunOS 4.1.1.  On building X11R4 it became evident that the data read from
disk was faulty from time to time.

Already when cat|uncompress|tar-ing the distribution, tar exited with
checksum errors at different locations. Checksums built over the files
several times showed different results almost each time(for the same
files), among them the "should-be" ones (using both bsd sum and sysV sum).
Trying again and again it finally got unpacked.  Next to die was the make
over the distribution.  Though no read errors were reported, files read
different at each try.  "sane" programs exited dumping cores one time and
went through on the next try.  Among them makedepend and cc (iropt). cc
exited with syntax errors one time, passing by next time. Some header
files had "stray" characters in them causing real syntax errors. After
they were corrected (and some restarts of make -k) finally the Release was
built. It took 5 runs of make to succeed on all targets.

I tried the disk in another Sun3/50 environment with the same results.
During "normal" use everything looks alright. Fsck usually remails silent.
The Disk is reported to have 192 bad blocks, one more having shown up a few
days ago.
I build the release from the same tape on a Sun 4/370 without any
problems.

Anybody having had similar problems /advice?
Thanx, Tatjana