hard disk failure

[Brant Cheikes]

This past Sunday manta's 40 Mb Hitachi drive bit the dust after 1.5 yr
of continuous service.  It has since been replaced with a Seagate
ST4096 80 Mb (28 ms).  I had nearly complete recent backups, so
restoration was relatively painless.  A couple observations follow.

First, thanks are in order to two good net-friends: Kevin O'Gorman and
Brendan Reilly.  Kevin put up with several telephone consultations and
pointed me to Fred Burgess of Mipro, a fellow who reconditions hard
drives (I'll be sending Fred my Hitachi in the near future).  Brendan
had the guts to lend me his spare 7300 to perform some hardware tests
with.  Without these folks and the bits of info I've picked up off the
netnoise, I am sure that manta's recovery would have been far less
expeditious and much more of a hassle.

I bought the ST4096 from Harmony Computers in Brooklyn.  The drive was
$579 plus $24 for UPS 2nd-day shipment.  I placed the order on Tuesday
morning, the drive appeared on Thursday morning.  Standard disclaimers
apply---I'm just a satisfied customer.

There were two minor problems with the drive, both stemming from the
fact that it came configured for drop-in installation into an IBM
PC-AT.  Problem 1: the drive had "rails" affixed to each side of it,
clearly to fit an AT's chassis.  These rails must be removed before
the drive will fit into a 3b1's disk drive mounting cabinet.
Unfortunately, they were affixed with special screws; I spent some
time running around Penn's engineering labs looking for the right
tool.  It turns out that you need a size-10 "tork" (sp?).

Problem 2: the drive came configured to respond as drive 1 instead of
drive 0.  There was a little clip-on jumper on the underside of the
drive that had to be moved from the second position on a set of pins
to the first position.  Once that was done, the drive passed all the
diagnostics, formatted fine, etc.

My only remaining complaint about the drive is that disk seeks seem to
generate more momentary vibration than were produced by the Hitachi.
-- 
Brant Cheikes
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Computer and Information Science
brant at manta.pha.pa.us, brant at linc.cis.upenn.edu, bpa!manta!brant