Changing hard drives and GRUB

Douglas Mayne Well, other than failing the badblocks test, I have had no failures from the Diamond Max 9s. I certainly have not experienced any of the problems on the page you linked for Diamond Max 8s. I have never had mechanical noise from drives in my PCs. I did see about 24 removable pack hard drives all crash over the weekend, grinding all the oxide from the surface of the disks under the heads, and digging a deap groove in the aluminum substrate. Fortunately, I did not own those. Try to get 480 head buttemblies all at once sometime.

I really do not like the contention on the EIDE bus where I have two of the things. So I will replace them with Ultra-320 SCSI drives. The fact that they are 10,000rpm instead of 7,200 rpm should help a little, but the ability to run them on a SCSI controller is important to me. If disk IO performance were not so important to me, I would not put 6 drives on a machine when one or two really big ones would have as much capacity. The four existing SCSI drives are only 18GBytes each. I need spindles and their implied independent head positioning mechanisms more than capacity.

Sigh. Back when I bought the Diamond Max 9s, the salesman at Maxtor said they were much better drives than the Diamond Max 8s. They came with a 3-year warranty instead of 1-year.

OTOH, the Maxtor Atlas 10K was designed and manufactured by Quantum before Maxtor bought them out, and I have been running two of those 24-7 since early 2000. My big machine has 4 Maxtor Atlas 10K V3 units in it and these have been running 24-7 since early 2004. Both types come with a 5-year warranty. It seems to me that they are higher quality than the retail IDE units. Now Seagate seems to have bought out Maxtor. Sigh.

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