micron

Western Digital hard drives

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

Apparently it’s possible right now to get WD hard drives dirt cheap at certain warehouse clubs in St. Louis. How cheap? One person wrote in and told me $30 after rebates for a 10-gig drive. He asked me what I thought of the deal. It’s a great price, sure. My problem is, if I bought one, I’d be tempted to actually use it.
I’m very down on Western Digital. At my previous employer, we had about 600 PCs, with a variety of drives: a small number of Seagates, and roughly equal representation of IBM, Maxtor, Western Digital, and Quantum. We had maybe a drive a month go bad on us (ours was an aging fleet). I saw about as many Western Digitals go bad as all the rest–combined. I’ll buy an IBM, Maxtor, or Quantum drive without flinching, but I stay away from WD.

At my current employer, we have fewer problems (newer equipment), but I still see about as many WDs go down as anything else. Here we have mostly WD, Samsung, IBM, and Seagate drives, since that’s what Micron tends to use. Again, I see about as many WDs go as all the others. The last WD to go out happened when I took a half-dozen PCs to a convention in New Orleans. It was the middle of registration, with tired travelers all around, and the machine kept locking up. Finally, one time the drive just didn’t come back. I located a computer store, paid an outrageous price for a drive (unfortunately, another WD because it was all they had), and managed to get the drive in with only a couple hours’ downtime. But after failing me when I most needed dependability, I vowed to never buy another WD. Whenever I spec a drive for work, I get a Maxtor. I find them more reliable, faster, and they’re just as easy to find as WDs. And the CompUSA down the street always has a good deal on them.

Tongue-tied

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

Anything to say? My sister (yes, she has a name–it’s Di) mailed me and asked me if I had anything to say today. Not really. I finally won a major victory at work that will result in the departure of two Macintoshes that have become the bane of my existence. The battle came at a high personal price–I’m exhausted and have little to say. Other than an observation that AppleShare IP 6.3 appears to be about as rude as its predecessors. It seems to like MacOS 9, but it also seems very willing to crash MacOS 8.6 and earlier clients. Seeing as these are 100, 120, and 132 MHz machines, upgrading to 9 isn’t exactly practical or worthwhile or cost-effective. So they’re getting brand spanking new Micron PCs with Pentium III 600 chips or whatever it is we’re buying these days. I will be very joyfully installing them in the morning.

———- From: al wynn
Does McAfee still sell Nuts&Bolts?

Exactly how do you use Nuts&Bolts to “sort directory entries by the file’s physical placement on the hard drive” (ie. under which menu item can I find it ?)

Also, what are some good web links (or other resources) that will show me how to optimize Norton Utilities configuration ?

———-
It’s in Disk Tune. Click Advanced–>Directory Sort–>Sort Criteria. There you can select Cluster number as your directory sort criteria. Under Win95, this makes N&B’s Disk Tune the best defragmenter/optimizer, but under Win98, NU’s Speed Disk and Fix-It’s Defrag Plus have features that will make them outperform Disk Tune in spite of this feature (they actually do some strategic fragmentation to increase speed). I suppose you could optimize the disk with one of the others, then try to get Disk Tune to skip the defragmentation part and just optimize the directories, but I think I tried to figure out how to do that and gave up. Alternatively you could optimize with Disk Tune first, then defragment with one of the others and not do anything with the directory entries–assuming you want to save absolutely every microsecond possible. (Be aware that Disk Tune is a very slow program, so we’re talking diminishing returns here to run it, then run one of the others.)

I haven’t seen a better resource for the utilities suites than chapters 3 and 5 of Optimizing Windows; those chapters were the result of about seven years’ experience messing around with disk utilities (starting under DOS, of course). I’ve never seen a Web site on the subject (good or bad); nor much other information outside of the manuals that came with some of the older versions. That was part of the reason why I wrote my own. I tried to explain what to do with whatever suite you happened to have, as well as the reasoning behind it.

Identifying the motherboard in a mystery system

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

Wednesday, 4/26/00
I had to identify the type of memory a system in a remote location uses today. This technique won’t always work as smoothly as it did for me, but it gives you a fighting chance.

Life’s much easier with name-brand systems: go to Crucial, tell it you’ve got a Compaq Presario 660, and it gives you the Crucial/Micron part number. This wasn’t that easy. The system was built by Budget Computers, a clone shop in St. Charles, Mo. So, here’s how I identified it. I had the owner shut down, unplug the keyboard, and power back up. Up pops the dumbest of error messages–“Keyboard not present, press F1 to continue.” The good thing is, the BIOS code is there in plain view. In this case, it was i430VX-W877-2A59GPA9C-00.

I headed to motherboards.org, clicked on Spot (their board search engine), punched in the letters PA, since that’s the manufacturer code for Award BIOSes (they tell you how to extract the code from AMI BIOS strings as well), and found out it was an EPoX board. Good deal. I punched the part number code into their search engine and got a fat goose egg. Hrumph. I headed to EPoX’s site at www.epox.com, and found a list of EPoX BIOS codes in their knowledgebase. Cool. It turns out that i430VX-W877-2A59GPA9C-00 is the code for the EPoX P55-TV. Crucial doesn’t have a parts listing for the P55-TV, but EPoX’s site has the manual online in PDF form. I viewed the manual, and whaddya know, it’s got four SIMM sockets and a DIMM socket, and it supports FPM, EDO, and SDRAM, up to 128 MB. I happen to know that the 430VX chipset doesn’t cache more than 64 MB, so the utility of putting 128 megs in it is questionable (unless you’re going to make a 64 MB RAM disk under Windows 9x). I don’t know if that’s mentioned in the manual or not. I was mostly interested in whether it had DIMM sockets capable of taking SDRAM, because SIMMs are priced like highway robbery these days in comparison.

Head back to Crucial, tell it I want pricing on an SDRAM DIMM, and immediately I know the pricing on 32, 64, and 128 MB modules. Total time invested: 15 minutes.

And I had a college professor try to tell me once that the Internet isn’t a legitimate research tool. Well, legit or not, it gave me all the information I needed in slightly more time than it would have taken for me to disassemble the system and look for myself, assuming I was close enough to the system to actually lay hands on it (I wasn’t).