Maxtor Archives - The Silicon Underground

How long does a hard drive last?

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:00:25 +0000

If you’re asking how long does a hard drive last, I found this study on hard drive longevity last week. I take issue with the opening paragraph but the rest of the article is very good. The opening paragraph is

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Happy birthday, IBM PC!

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:04:11 +0000

The IBM PC 5150 turns 30 today. IBM didn’t invent the personal computer, but if your computer has an Intel or AMD CPU in it, it’s the direct descendant of the beige box IBM unleashed on the world on August

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How to clean an MBR and recover drive partitions

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:51:05 +0000

Sometimes it’s necessary to recover drive partitions because you accidentally repartitioned a drive you didn’t mean to, or because your MBR got infected or otherwise trashed. Here’s how to recover them, for free. Infecting MBRs with malware is popular with

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Like father, like son. Plus, a tribute to Quantum

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:16:28 +0000

This weekend, I tried to put together a PC from secondhand parts. For the missing parts, I went into the basement, swept the floor, and used what I found.

My one-year-old helped.

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New life for a Compaq Presario S5140WM

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:34:27 +0000

I'm fixing up my mother in law's Compaq Presario S5140WM. She bought it about five years ago, a few weeks after her daughter and I started dating. It's been a pretty good computer for her, but lately it's been showing signs it might be overheating.

I took the shotgun approach, replacing pretty much everything that I would expect to be at or near the end of its life at five years.

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I rebuilt a Dell Dimension 4100 last night

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 13:54:05 +0000

So, I rebuilt a Dell Dimension 4100 last night. I didn't make any hardware changes other than replacing the Western Digital hard drive inside, which was on its last legs.

Along the way, I learned a few things.

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Rediscovering OS/2

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 04:26:43 +0000

So I picked up a surplus computer from work this week. Honestly, I bought it more because it was cheap than because I needed it. But it was a giveaway price for a good-quality system. Micron's Client Pro line (its business-class line) is as well-built a PC as I've ever seen. The machine didn't come as advertised, but it was still a good price for what I got: a 266 MHz Pentium II, 64 MB of RAM, a 4-gig Maxtor hard drive, a Lite-On CD-ROM drive of unspecified speed (it seems to be at least 24X), an Intel 10/100 PCI NIC, Nvidia Riva-based AGP video, an ISA Sound Blaster, and an ISA US Robotics 56K faxmodem.

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What brand of hard drive should I buy?

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 18 Apr 2003 04:23:48 +0000

LinuxWorld posted an article today on how to install another hard disk in Linux. The guide's pretty good from the software side.

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I just built a PC

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 23 Feb 2003 04:59:07 +0000

It's late, so I'll save a lot of the gory details for tomorrow, but I built a PC over the course of the last couple of days. I did it a little bit differently than the last couple I've built.

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Quieting a noisy PC

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 25 Jan 2003 13:43:34 +0000

Just as PCs seem to (or sometimes really do) get slower as they age, PCs also tend to get louder as they age. Considering many of them are plenty loud when new, that's not good.

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