Known-good drive manufacturers, known-trusty PC review sources

Replace it and the controller rebuilds it back into sync with the other drive. In "real" arrays you have designated spare drives idle in the array and the controller will do the replacement automatically bringing you back to full redundancy in a matter of minutes (depends on drive capacity) without any manual intervention. You then replace the dead drive from the failed set and put the replacement in the spare set ready for the next failure. All transparent to the system(s) the array is serving.

A RAID controller is not particularly expensive - and if the objective is reliability then it is the only way to go (make sure you use dual raid controllers)

Dirmatch.exe - old DOS program that worked that way.

Thanks. There's an NTFS version that I'll research, being very suspicious of free downloads. HDDScan: a very capable Russian disk test program. HDD Scan: bogus malware.

jsw

;-)

I had it easy! 6800 processor, 512 bytes (later upgraded to 4k) RAM, 1k ROM, audio cassette storage, 64 x 32 dot video display(!), hex keypad...

Chris.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

You had flip flops? We tied old newspapers around our feet and walked three miles to school, in the snow, up hill. Both ways. It wasn't just a bit cold, either.

Got a link to the NTFS thing? That would be very handy.

The first computer I used hands-on was the old PDP-8 with discrete transistor logic and magnetic core memory. I qualified to operate the Melbourne University IBM 7040/44 at much the same time, which was much the same technology, but with magnetic tape drives rather than paper tape for mass storage. That would have been 1968.

The original computer on the campus was CSIRAC

with mercury delay line memory and fast paper tape mass storage. It shut down around the time I first started programming, but I'd dump my box of IBM punch cards next to it to picked up and taken to the IBM7040/44 (which was still at the IBM office in Melbourne at the time.

And SOME of them, when one drive dies, are virtually impossible to install a new drive in. Oats that have already been through the horse.

DVD DL holds 8gb+

Windows 2003 does raid1 (mirroring) for boot drive.

Have had 2 where one drive was reported as bad, and it was impossible to get an identical spare drive to work. Had to order the drive pre set up from the manufacturer at about 4 times the price of a raw drive

- and about $20 less than the original cost of the enclosure with the

We pitched them instead. They had some sort of proprietary Xnix OS embedde

I haven't run into those issues, the controllers support mismatched drives, just limiting the useable size to the smaller of the two.

That must be some bottom end garbage.

Still not enough to waste your time with for any sort of overall backup. Even Blu-Ray isn't even close to useable for that. All the enterprise class backups are going to disk based and data de-duplication. Tape can't keep up with capacities, much less the optical media which can't keep up with tape capacities. The latest multi-layer Blu-Ray can't even compete with obsolete DLT tapes much less superDLT.

The first Shugart 5.25" drives were 35 track, the later were 40 track,

Just Google it. I was getting ready for a meeting and didn't have time to examine the results closely, and now it's 11:30PM. Any way the backups I've been rearranging are HDTV recording which consist of a small number of huge files.