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Subject: Re: IBM Desktar disk problem?
From: Daniel Egger <degger@fhm.edu>
To: Thunder from the hill <thunder@ngforever.de>
Cc: venom@sns.it, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Date: 05 Jul 2002 17:23:39 +0200
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Am Fre, 2002-07-05 um 16.03 schrieb Thunder from the hill:

> ...and tell all the people who got a DTLA (because it's not as expensive 
> as others in some countries, mind France, USA, Germany) to drop their 
> disks if they want to use Linux, because we're too lazy to find a 
> solution. That might be cool to you, but we want HARDWARE SUPPORT for 
> Linux! That's why we're here.
 
> There _is_ a solution, we just have to find it.

Except you believe in the at least questionable explanation from IBM 
there's nothing one can solve with software. And since quite a lot
of drives died under several Linux, Windows, *BSD and Mac versions
I don't buy the driver argument and in fact think that IBM is using
this poor excuse to avoid a big (and expensive) replacement plan
on the cost of the users.

I've yet to see a <insert your favourite non-IBM harddrive manufacturer
here>-drive dying after a few months of use, the negative record in this
regard (except for the IBMs) was a Quantum Atlas UW-SCSI drive (which
was in fact also manufactured FOR IBM) which died after 2,5 years of
heavy use which is at least somewhere in the range what one might expect
as lifetime; all other drives here (up to 10 years old) are still alive
and kickin'.

Even if you have backups and RAID systems, a broken harddrive can be
quite expensive; think of data restoration, drive replacement,
downtimes, shipment, data loss which all costs at least one thing: time
and lots of it. 

We estimate around 10h per broken drive while it takes a lot less time
(<1h) to simple replace the discs before the accident which is what
we're doing now with all IBM drives prophylactically.

-- 
Servus,
       Daniel