Quickie: 7200 IBM HDs

[Anavrin]

Are all 7200RPM IBM HDs Deskstar 75GXPs?

I have a Deskstar 30 Gig 7200RPM IBM harddrive. But nowhere does it indicate what type of Deskstar it is nor if it supports ATA100 or not. So is it a Deskstar 75GXP with ATA100 support?

 

[amb#cog]

Are all 7200RPM IBM HDs Deskstar 75GXPs?

No.

Go to IBM's site, and search the part #. They made a 34gxp, and maybe more. The 34 was a 66, as would anything other then a 75 as far as I know anyway.

 

[Anavrin]

Yay, thanks!

Hey, it is a 75 GXP

Haha, I got a great discount on it too.

I love it when there's a typo in the price. Especially when it lowers it and the cashier doesn't have a clue as to what the true price should be.

Just in case you're wondering, I got this for $196 Canadian. Divide that by 1.55 or so to get roughly what it would cost in the US. And then subtract a few dollars for shipping.

 

[Jeff H]

AFAIK the 14GXP were the first 7200RPM EIDE drives. I had/have a 22GXP that's also 7200RPM. The next 7200RPM drives to come out of IBM are the 60GXP, and they simply have higher density platters (20G per platter, vs. 15G for the 75GXP), reduced power consumption, and better acoustics (according to IBM).

 

[Sugadaddy]

Don't know how much it was priced before the error, but I just bought one for 199$ CA.

 

[Anavrin]

Well, the cashier said it was $208, but then I showed her the ad they put out.

Anyway, okay, I tried putting the HD into my 430VX. Read ok. And the biox only supports 8 gigs max. That's okay too.

I made the 8 gigs I could use into a partition, but I can't access the drive. Does this mean I have to format the partition?!

There's absolutely nothing on the drive, but I don't like formatting. Too much can kill a drive's integrity. And I have no doubts that I will be formatting it a million times.

 

[Modus]

Formatting is not at all harmfull to the drive, any more than booting into Windows or copying a folder. It's a normal read/write operation like anything else.

The FORMAT command has, since at least 1995, not really wiped the drive. It simply wipes the FAT and then performs a cluster-by-cluster read/write test to pick up bad sectors. That's why it's relatively easy for a program like Lost & Found to recover from a botched FDISK and FORMAT. Actually, FORMAT /Q does exactly the same thing as FORMAT, only without the bad sector test. It's just that FORMAT does not allow the /Q switch on a fresh partition.

Modus

 

[Anavrin]

Hmm, according to one of the Firing Squad moderators, formatting is a completely different type of instruction than read/write. And that doing too much of it (think long term) can be harmful.

And I did try to do a quickformat, but that didn't work and prompted me to format it. I also didn't want to wait for a 8 gig drive to format on this slow computer.

 

[Modus]

They are dead wrong.

There is nothing you can do to a drive in software besides reading or writing to it. Some manufacturers release various utilities like Maxtor's Acoustic Management, which communicates directly with the drive controller, but this is NOT what happens during a standard FORMAT operation.

You may be thinking of a true low level format.

What most people call "low level formatting" technically isn't. It just wipes every physical byte on the entire drive, destroying all logical and artificial structures (e.g. master boot record, partition tables, boot records, file allocation tables (FAT), data). This is sometimes necessary when a program has so corrupted the drive that FDISK refuses to repartition properly.

Low level formatting technically refers to a factory process called defect management, whereby the drive is scanned for the usual bad sectors that occur during production. Those sectors are mapped and recorded so that the drive never writes to them again. Currently, only IBM provides a true defect management utility for download, however you probably don't want to use it, since any newbad sectors on a warrantied drive is a sure sign it needs to be RMA'd.

Modus

 

[PCResources]

<< according to one of the Firing Squad moderators >>



Well, the Firing Squad moderaters often give advice even though they don't know what they are talking about... I have had discussions with them in the past, and they rarely give up their arguments even if you can present actual proof that what they are saying is wrong... They still hand out the same advice, time and time again...

Modus is right here, you can format your drive 20 times a day and it will not hurt it at all, in fact, a simple move command is harder on the drive, as it requires more movement of the heads...

Patrick Palm

PC Resources

 

[jamarno]

<< Hmm, according to one of the Firing Squad moderators, formatting is a completely different type of instruction than read/write. And that doing too much of it (think long term) can be harmful. >>



I thought Firing Squad was about high-performance computing, but their comment is relevant only to some ancient Seagate half-height MFM and RLL drives of the mid-1980s. These Seagates used a stepper motor instead of a servo, except for an index track just beyond track 0. This track normally couldn't be overwritten, but if the mounting screws were too long and pressed hard enough against the drive chassis, the heads would misalign and let the index track to be overwritten during low-level formatting. So the next time the controller issued a recalibrate command, the drive would try in vain and then give up and just go to a default track position, but maybe not before the BIOS lost patience and reported a boot error. But hit reset, and the next boot would be fine.

The only way to greatly shorten drive life is by doing a lot of frequent random seeks over an extended period of time. This can makes the head positioner chip run hot enough to burn out.