Removable Drive Bays

[Rita_A_Berkowitz]

Massive kludge? Mobile racks have been used in servers for years. What
an idiot. I'm not using any right now but I have used, and own, ATA
133 Lian-Li plastic racks with no issues at all.

The bottom line is what ever works for you. Just as long as you have proper
air flow you should be fine.

Rita

 

[Rita_A_Berkowitz]

Would you consider a SATA mobile rack a kludge? If so, why?

I wouldn't even consider SATA mobile racks. If you want to do it right just
use 1" hot swap SCSI trays. Works every time since they are designed for
proper cooling while utilizing minimum space.



Rita

 

[Rod Speed]

I wouldn't even consider SATA mobile racks.

Yeah, but you're just a rabid one eyed bigot.

If you want to do it right just use 1" hot swap SCSI trays.

No thanks, SCSI has passed its useby
date for personal desktop systems.

Works every time since they are designed for
proper cooling while utilizing minimum space.

Pity about the total price.

 

[Luxor]

What a pig ignorant fool.

I've bet you've never even used one ever in your life. Ignorance is
bliss, huh?

 

[Rod Speed]

I've bet you've never even used one ever in your life.

Guess which pig ignorant fool has just lost its bet ?

Ignorance is bliss, huh?

Wanking is bliss in your case child.

 

[Luxor]

Guess which pig ignorant fool has just lost its bet ?

Next time do a bit of research and get a decent one then. I OC my cpu
which puts it out of spec too but it runs 100%. They do make cables
that are desinged to run reliably overspec you know? How else do you
think they get all those harddrives running fine way up to the top
shelf on those massive servers? Look it up twat.

 

[Rod Speed]

Next time do a bit of research and get a decent one then.

No thanks. Like I said, I prefer to buy stuff that
follows the standard instead of shit that flouts it.

I OC my cpu which puts it out of spec too but it runs 100%.

More fool you.

They do make cables that are desinged
to run reliably overspec you know?

Not even possible with those stupid bay kits.

How else do you think they get all those
harddrives running fine way up to the top
shelf on those massive servers?

They dont use IDE, ****wit.

Look it up twat.

Go shove your head up a dead bear's arse.

 

[Richard Alexander]

I am really glad that I found this thread. I have some questions about
removable drive bays. Unfortunately, I cannot see anything that John H
posts, unless someone copies him in a reply. I've read posts from Rod
Speed, Andy Axnot and Folkert Rienstra, among others.

Rod, I have a general idea of what the ATA standard is, but I don't
know how that applies to removable drive bays. Would you please
explain?

I began using the Inclose Mobile Dock several years ago with my Duron
800 FIC AZ-11 system with 512 Meg of PC133 RAM, running Windows 98SE,
Windows Me and SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional. I like to configure an
entire hard drive for different uses, for example, one hard drive is
for "programming" because I used up all my Windows 98SE environment
space--the original reason I went to the removable bay system. I use
one hard drive as a home entertainment center, playing movies and
computer games. Another hard drive is for removable storage, which I
keep in a fire resistant safe. One hard drive is for SuSE Linux and
another for Windows XP Home. I have one hard drive that is configured
for connecting to the Internet. Most of my hard drives are 7200 RPM
(one is 5600 RPM) and range in size from 20 Gig to 80 Gig. Most are
ATA 133 drives. My original system only had room for one removable bay
dock (my CD-RW and DVD drives took up my other 5.25 inch bays). My
second hard drive was permanently mounted in the case, for use as a
data drive that all the removable drives could share.

I have been very happy with my removable bay. It is true that my
system has not been a stable as I would have liked, but I blame that
on Microsoft. I find that Windows can be reasonably stable if it only
has a few installed programs (the fewer, the better). Predictably, my
main use hard drive, which runs Windows Me and has 45 major groupings
on the Start menu and connects to the Internet, is not very stable. My
5600 RPM hard drive, which I hardly use for anything other than
watching DVDs, has rarely given me any trouble.

I just replaced my old system, because I attributed the sudden and
growing appearance of bad clusters to a bad hard drive controller on
the motherboard. Besides, I had been wanting to upgrade, and this made
a nice excuse. So, now I'm running an Athlon XP 2200+ on a FIC AU13
with a Gig of PC3200 RAM. I would like to have two removable drive
bays.

The best Inclose I could find at Fry's Electronics is only rated for
Ultra 100, though the front of the box says, "IDE Ultra 133." This is
the Inclose PMD-96i Kit. I bought one of these, to make a pair with my
old kit.

I bought two Kingwin KF-32 Series bays because the box says "ultra
ATA100/ATA133." Kingwin is less expensive than Inclose, but having
both gives me a bit of insurance that one might work right if the
other does not.

BTW, both Inclose and Kingwin have a locking mechanism to prevent the
removal of the drive tray while the system has power to it.

Much to my surprise and disappointment, I have found that it is
impossible to boot my computer with two removable drive bays on the
Channel Zero Cable. POST finds and identifies both drives, but will
not go any further. I've changed the jumpers on the drives to Cable
Select and Master/Slave, and I've tried both brands of drive bays, but
it does no good. The only way I can get my system to boot with two
removable drive bays is to have one on one channel and the other on
the other channel. I don't want to do this, though, because that means
I have to put my optical drives on the same channel as my hard drives,
which, I have read, will slow the data rate of the hard drives. I
found Folkert's comments about signal reflection interesting. I'm
using two Flt-Kit clear rounded ATA 133 cables, which appear to have
aluminum sheaths around the cables. I've never used rounded cables,
before.

So, does what I've described sound like I won't be able to get my
system to work with both removable drive bays on Channel Zero? Any
solutions?

This motherboard comes with two SATA connectors. I'm wondering if I
should raise the priority of switching to SATA drives, in light of the
configuration issues I'm facing?

Thank you.

 

[Rod Speed]

I am really glad that I found this thread. I have some questions about
removable drive bays. Unfortunately, I cannot see anything that John H
posts, unless someone copies him in a reply. I've read posts from Rod
Speed, Andy Axnot and Folkert Rienstra, among others.

Rod, I have a general idea of what the ATA standard is, but I don't know
how that applies to removable drive bays. Would you please explain?

Basically removable drive bays flout the ATA standard.

Mostly on the cabling detail.

SATA does cover it and so does the external standards like USB and firewire.

I began using the Inclose Mobile Dock several years ago with my Duron
800 FIC AZ-11 system with 512 Meg of PC133 RAM, running Windows
98SE, Windows Me and SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional. I like to configure
an entire hard drive for different uses, for example, one hard drive is for
"programming" because I used up all my Windows 98SE environment
space--the original reason I went to the removable bay system.

Sure, there is no arguement about the convenience in some situations.
The problem is that if the standard is flouted, that can bite.

I use one hard drive as a home entertainment
center, playing movies and computer games.

Thats a pretty crude approach tho, using separate drives
for those configs. Specially when it flouts the standard.

Another hard drive is for removable storage,
which I keep in a fire resistant safe.

Yes, but removable drive bays aint the only way to do
that. One obvious alternative is a firewire or USB2 drive.

One hard drive is for SuSE Linux and another
for Windows XP Home. I have one hard drive
that is configured for connecting to the Internet.

Again, hard to justify flouting the standard for that.

Most of my hard drives are 7200 RPM (one is 5600 RPM)
and range in size from 20 Gig to 80 Gig. Most are ATA 133
drives. My original system only had room for one removable bay
dock (my CD-RW and DVD drives took up my other 5.25 inch bays).
My second hard drive was permanently mounted in the case,
for use as a data drive that all the removable drives could share.

And you dont have to do it like that. All the stuff on the removable
drives can be on a single hard drive with a proper boot manager.

And that is rather more convenient to use than
farting around physically changing physical drives.

I have been very happy with my removable bay.

Sure, but that doesnt mean much. You havent used the alternatives.

It is true that my system has not been a stable as
I would have liked, but I blame that on Microsoft.

You cant.

I find that Windows can be reasonably stable if it only
has a few installed programs (the fewer, the better).

Thats completely silly. And you can still do that with a
proper boot manager and a single physical drive anyway.

Predictably, my main use hard drive, which runs
Windows Me and has 45 major groupings on the Start
menu and connects to the Internet, is not very stable.

Mine was. With a lot more than that. And its even better
with XP, tho thats mainly quite trivial differences like
being able to rely on which instance of IE is used etc.

My 5600 RPM hard drive, which I hardly use for anything
other than watching DVDs, has rarely given me any trouble.

Most hard drives dont give anyone any trouble.

I just replaced my old system, because I attributed
the sudden and growing appearance of bad clusters
to a bad hard drive controller on the motherboard.

And that could well have been due to
the use of the removable drive bay.

Since you chose to flout the ATA standard,
you can never be sure on that.

Besides, I had been wanting to upgrade, and this made
a nice excuse. So, now I'm running an Athlon XP 2200+
on a FIC AU13 with a Gig of PC3200 RAM. I would like
to have two removable drive bays.

The best Inclose I could find at Fry's Electronics is only rated
for Ultra 100, though the front of the box says, "IDE Ultra 133."

Typical of the problem with those kludges.

This is the Inclose PMD-96i Kit. I bought
one of these, to make a pair with my old kit.

I bought two Kingwin KF-32 Series bays because
the box says "ultra ATA100/ATA133." Kingwin is less
expensive than Inclose, but having both gives me a bit of
insurance that one might work right if the other does not.

Nope, and thats the problem with kludges that flout the standard.

BTW, both Inclose and Kingwin have a locking mechanism to prevent
the removal of the drive tray while the system has power to it.

Much to my surprise and disappointment, I have found that
it is impossible to boot my computer with two removable
drive bays on the Channel Zero Cable. POST finds and
identifies both drives, but will not go any further. I've changed
the jumpers on the drives to Cable Select and Master/Slave,
and I've tried both brands of drive bays, but it does no good.

Typical problem seen with kludges that flout the standard.

The only way I can get my system to boot with two removable drive
bays is to have one on one channel and the other on the other channel.

Thats likely because the other config flouts the standard even
more grossly than this one, particularly the stub thats inevitable
on the middle drive connector with removable drive bays.

I don't want to do this, though, because that means I have to
put my optical drives on the same channel as my hard drives,
which, I have read, will slow the data rate of the hard drives.

It doesnt.

And if you dont flout the standard, you can have a bigger drive on
the primary IDE channel, and wont need a removable drive bay at all.

Have the one you put in the safe in a firewire or USB2 external enclosure.

Guaranteed to work fine and you can continue to
have the optical drives on the same ribbon cable too.

I found Folkert's comments about signal reflection interesting.
I'm using two Flt-Kit clear rounded ATA 133 cables,

They flout the ATA standard even more
comprehensively than removable drive bays do.

which appear to have aluminum sheaths around the cables.

Pointless with ATA which is designed to work with ribbon
cables with interleaved grounds for the higher speeds.

I've never used rounded cables, before.

You should stop using them now.

So, does what I've described sound like I won't be able to get my
system to work with both removable drive bays on Channel Zero?
Correct.

Any solutions?

See above.

This motherboard comes with two SATA connectors. I'm
wondering if I should raise the priority of switching to SATA
drives, in light of the configuration issues I'm facing?

Sure. At least SATA does support removable drive bays.

Bit hard to find yet tho.

Personally I'd just use a bigger drive as the main boot drive
with a proper boot manager and a firewire or USB2 drive
for the drive that goes in the safe. Trivially buyable now.

 

[Richard Alexander]

[snip]

Rod, I have a general idea of what the ATA standard is, but I don't know
how that applies to removable drive bays. Would you please explain?

Basically removable drive bays flout the ATA standard.

Mostly on the cabling detail.

If you would not mind, would you please provide some details about
this flouting? I really enjoy knowing about this stuff.

SATA does cover it and so does the external standards like USB and firewire.

It is nice that my new motherboard happens to cover all three of those
standards. All three are integrated into the motherboard. I had to use
a PCI-to-IEEE 1394 card in my old system, and it only had USB 1.1 (no
SATA or RAID).

[snip]

Thats a pretty crude approach tho, using separate drives
for those configs. Specially when it flouts the standard.

I guess that means the duct tape is out, too...

Yes, but removable drive bays aint the only way to do
that. One obvious alternative is a firewire or USB2 drive.

I haven't looked into that very much, because a quick glance at any of
the external hard drives at Fry's shows prices far beyond what I want
to pay. However, at the end of this post you bring up an interesting
alternative that I haven't really examined to this point:

Have the one you put in the safe in a firewire or USB2 external enclosure.

The last time I was at Fry's I happened to notice that they sell SATA
removable drive bays and I think they sell external Firewire and USB
hard drive kits. Those are still a bit pricey, but I can managed to
afford them, if there is enough justification for them.

[snip]

And you dont have to do it like that. All the stuff on the removable
drives can be on a single hard drive with a proper boot manager.

Technically, yes, it would be possible to do that. There are a few
reasons that I have not done that, and would prefer not to do that.

About 10 years ago, long before I ever heard about removable drive
bays, I bought my second computer. I think it had a 100 Meg hard drive
and a 486 processor. I regularly backed up my data to floppy disks.
Eventually, I bought an Iomega 2 Gig tape drive and overwrote all my
backup floppies. During all this time, I had boughts of data
corruption on my hard drive, but I was able to get by with my backups
and Norton's.

I continued buying new computers as one after another died (one of my
male cats hastened the demise of my 500 MHz Cyrix motherboard). My
tape drive stopped reading tapes and simply unwound them. I lost all
data on entire partitions. I discovered that I could often limit data
loss to a single partition, so I began to divide my hard drives into
several partitions.

I bought various boot selectors. My latest was System Commander 2000.
It works OK, but I consider boot selectors an annoying kluge. I still
use System Commander, though, because it is really handy for handling
partitions, even though it will only install on my Windows 98SE hard
drive. I haven't upgraded to V Communication's latest, which appears
to be installable on any MS Windows OS. A big part of the reason that
I even have Windows 98SE installed on any of my hard drives is that
System Commander 2000 will only install on that drive.

So, my first reason for multiple hard drives is data security. That's
especially true when someone (human or virus) starts nosing around my
system via the Internet. No matter what Microsoft concocts in its next
wave of invasiveness, it isn't going to access a hard drive that isn't
even connected to my system! No one is going to load an application or
program or software on a hard drive that isn't connected to my system!
Drive bearing failure is not going to wipe out all my data if my data
is on multiple hard drives! Electrical glitches won't fry my hard
drives that are safely shielded and disconnected from my system! In my
15 years of using and servicing computers, I've seen all of these
problems several times.

My second reason is that single large drives are less economical than
multiple smaller drives. Currently, the optimum price appears to be
around 80 to 120 Gig (typically $1 a Gig at that size).

Incidentally, I had to retire my 40 Gig data drive when it became
full. True, it still has a few Gig of free space, scattered across
various partitions, but my photography partition, which takes up more
than half the drive, only has about 300 kB of free space. So, it is
now in an electrostatic bag in my fire retardant safe. Before retiring
it, I copied all its data onto my 60 Gig hard drive, which now serves
as the shared drive. I figure that buys me another year or so before
it will also have to be retired. Of course, that's assuming I only
take still pictures, rather than saving my camcorder tapes to disk.

In the near future, I hope to buy a DVD recorder, though copying 40
Gig to DVD would still be a pain.

So, it is useful to me to keep my data and applications on separate
hard drives, besides being in separate partitions.

And that is rather more convenient to use than
farting around physically changing physical drives.

I'd rather swap hard drives when I desire than have to select the boot
OS every time I boot.

Sure, but that doesnt mean much. You havent used the alternatives.

So many options, so little time and money. You make good arguments for
exploring a bit, though.

You cant.

I am not limited just to my own personal experiences. I can also look
at a thousand other machines in a variety of environments. Microsoft
does not sell quality; it sells a toy OS that is just good enough, but
no better than necessary. Why, they won't even guarantee their own
craftsmanship! They take our money and then absolve themselves of all
fault that might be in their product. They have been playing games
with us for decades, and no one has really taken it seriously, because
computers are fringe products that are more of a convenience or toy
than a critical tool. That's the same reason that my computer at work
is a piece of garbage; it doesn't have to be more than that for me to
perform my job.

Thats completely silly. And you can still do that with a
proper boot manager and a single physical drive anyway.


Mine was. With a lot more than that. And its even better
with XP, tho thats mainly quite trivial differences like
being able to rely on which instance of IE is used etc.

Everyone's mileage varies. Many people could not even get Windows Me
to boot. I've had relatively little trouble with Windows Me, compared
to everyone else I've personally met. Most of them had to ditch
Windows Me to get their systems running, again.

Windows Me was the most polar operating system MS has released. People
either had hardly any trouble with it, or hardly any success with it.
Of course, MS blames it all on the user...

Most hard drives dont give anyone any trouble.

That's a rather broad statement for you to make, don't you think?

And that could well have been due to
the use of the removable drive bay.

Could be. Or, it could have been due to any of a dozen other causes I
could name.

I must close, for now. Thank you for replying.

 

[Rod Speed]

If you would not mind, would you please provide some details
about this flouting? I really enjoy knowing about this stuff.

The main problem is that the cabling detail is nothing like
what the standard specifys with removable drive bays.

The worst is the effective stub you get with a drive
bay on the inner drive connector. Much more cable
between the connector and the drive than there is
with the connector directly on the drive.

It is nice that my new motherboard happens to cover all three of
those standards. All three are integrated into the motherboard.

Yeah, thats what I meant. I prefer to use those
because they dont flout the standard if you do want
a removable drive so you can put it in the safe etc.

I had to use a PCI-to-IEEE 1394 card in my old system,

Thats fine.

and it only had USB 1.1

Yeah, thats pretty hopeless for a full hard drive, much too slow.

(no SATA or RAID).

I guess that means the duct tape is out, too...

To say nothing of the chains and whips.

I haven't looked into that very much, because a
quick glance at any of the external hard drives at
Fry's shows prices far beyond what I want to pay.

Quite a bit cheaper to get just the external housing
and put the drive you currently have in that.

However, at the end of this post you bring up an interesting
alternative that I haven't really examined to this point:

The last time I was at Fry's I happened to notice that
they sell SATA removable drive bays and I think they
sell external Firewire and USB hard drive kits.

Thats the route I would take myself, that last, if
you do want to put the drive in a fireproof safe.

I prefer the other approach, dont bother to put full
drive backups in a fireproof safe, just write the stuff
that is irreplaceable to removable media like CDRs
and have one copy offsite. If the house burns down,
I dont care if I have to do a clean reinstall of the OS
and apps, thats a pretty small amount of work compared
with the hassle involved in replacing the house etc.

Those are still a bit pricey, but I can managed to
afford them, if there is enough justification for them.

I dont think there is myself with the drive in the fireproof safe.

Technically, yes, it would be possible to do that. There are a few
reasons that I have not done that, and would prefer not to do that.

About 10 years ago, long before I ever heard about removable
drive bays, I bought my second computer. I think it had a 100
Meg hard drive and a 486 processor. I regularly backed up my
data to floppy disks. Eventually, I bought an Iomega 2 Gig tape
drive and overwrote all my backup floppies. During all this time,
I had boughts of data corruption on my hard drive, but I was
able to get by with my backups and Norton's.

What makes sense changes over time. Tape has passed
its useby date for personal desktop systems now.

I continued buying new computers as one after another died
(one of my male cats hastened the demise of my 500 MHz
Cyrix motherboard). My tape drive stopped reading tapes
and simply unwound them. I lost all data on entire partitions.

That shouldnt be happening and imaging the partitions
is the obvious way to handle that if it happens much.

I discovered that I could often limit data loss to a single partition,
so I began to divide my hard drives into several partitions.

I bought various boot selectors. My latest was System Commander
2000. It works OK, but I consider boot selectors an annoying kluge.

So are removable drive bays. And you have the
nuisance of the physical change of drive with those too.

SC has its problems that other boot managers dont.

I still use System Commander, though, because it is really
handy for handling partitions, even though it will only install
on my Windows 98SE hard drive. I haven't upgraded to V
Communication's latest, which appears to be installable on
any MS Windows OS. A big part of the reason that I even
have Windows 98SE installed on any of my hard drives is
that System Commander 2000 will only install on that drive.

There's plenty of decent boot managers around.

So, my first reason for multiple hard drives is data security.

There's plenty of better approaches to data security than that.

That's especially true when someone (human or virus)
starts nosing around my system via the Internet.

A good boot manager can hide the partitions you dont want
visible. And you can image them as well for even more security.
To somewhere which isnt even connected except at image time.

No matter what Microsoft concocts in its next wave
of invasiveness, it isn't going to access a hard drive
that isn't even connected to my system! No one is
going to load an application or program or software
on a hard drive that isn't connected to my system!

Yes, but removable drive bays aint the only way to achieve that.

Drive bearing failure is not going to wipe out
all my data if my data is on multiple hard drives!

Sure, but images of that drive will protect against that. And
you need that for backup of the data on the single drive that
has the bearing failure anyway. And you're more likely to get
drive failure with a drive in a removable drive bay too.

Electrical glitches won't fry my hard drives that are
safely shielded and disconnected from my system!

See above.

In my 15 years of using and servicing computers,
I've seen all of these problems several times.

I've been running heaps more than that for a lot longer than
that and its completely routine to protect against that stuff.
Removable drive bays are just one way of doing that and that
approach has some real downsides, as you have just discovered.

My second reason is that single large drives are less economical
than multiple smaller drives. Currently, the optimum price appears
to be around 80 to 120 Gig (typically $1 a Gig at that size).

Separate arguement to removable drive bays.
You're always welcome to have more than
one drive instead of a larger main boot drive.

Incidentally, I had to retire my 40 Gig data drive when it became
full. True, it still has a few Gig of free space, scattered across
various partitions, but my photography partition, which takes up more
than half the drive, only has about 300 kB of free space. So, it is
now in an electrostatic bag in my fire retardant safe. Before retiring
it, I copied all its data onto my 60 Gig hard drive, which now serves
as the shared drive. I figure that buys me another year or so before
it will also have to be retired. Of course, that's assuming I only
take still pictures, rather than saving my camcorder tapes to disk.

Sure, but thats an entirely separate issue to removable drive bays.

In the near future, I hope to buy a DVD recorder,
though copying 40 Gig to DVD would still be a pain.

Sure, but its not so bad if you write the new stuff to
more than one DVD when you add it to the hard drive.

So, it is useful to me to keep my data and applications on
separate hard drives, besides being in separate partitions.

Nope. And thats still a separate issue to REMOVABLE drives anyway.

I'd rather swap hard drives when I desire than
have to select the boot OS every time I boot.

I dont.

So many options, so little time and money. You
make good arguments for exploring a bit, though.

I am not limited just to my own personal experiences.
I can also look at a thousand other machines in a variety
of environments. Microsoft does not sell quality; it sells a
toy OS that is just good enough, but no better than necessary.

Mindless bigotry. And you aint even using their non toy OSs.

Why, they won't even guarantee their own craftsmanship!

Neither does Linux.

They take our money and then absolve themselves of all
fault that might be in their product. They have been playing
games with us for decades, and no one has really taken it
seriously, because computers are fringe products that are
more of a convenience or toy than a critical tool.

Gets sillier by the minute.

That's the same reason that my computer at
work is a piece of garbage; it doesn't have to
be more than that for me to perform my job.

Everyone's mileage varies.
Nope.

Many people could not even get Windows Me to boot.

Sure, plenty dont have a clue.

I've had relatively little trouble with Windows Me, compared
to everyone else I've personally met. Most of them had to
ditch Windows Me to get their systems running, again.

Thats wildly exaggerated.

Windows Me was the most polar operating system MS has released.

So it cant have been that bad.

People either had hardly any trouble
with it, or hardly any success with it.

And clearly it must have worked well enough
for most to have become the most popular.

Of course, MS blames it all on the user...
Irrelevant.

That's a rather broad statement for you to make, don't you think?

Nope, its a fact. As anyone running thousands of PCs can tell you.

Could be. Or, it could have been due to any
of a dozen other causes I could name.

Nothing like a dozen.

 

[Richard Alexander]

[snip]

I don't want to do this, though, because that means I have to
put my optical drives on the same channel as my hard drives,
which, I have read, will slow the data rate of the hard drives.

It doesnt.

What am I to make of statements that appear in computer magazines that
say otherwise, such as this one from "Computer World"?

"For the best performance, keep hard drives on the primary channel (
A) and other drives on the secondary channel ( B). If possible, you
should avoid installing a hard drive on the same channel with a slower
optical drive, because this can limit the hard drive's performance."

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,102525,pg,2,00.asp

Or, what about the famous "AnandTech"?

"As most of you are well aware, a single IDE channel can support up to
two devices maximum. In order to operate your drive at Ultra ATA/66
speeds, all of the devices on that channel must also be Ultra ATA/66
compliant. This means that you will not be able to keep your old PIO
mode 4 CDROM drive or DVD drive on the same channel as your new Ultra
ATA/66 hard drive without hindering performance.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1237&p=2

Or, how about this Web page?

"For performance reasons, it is better to avoid mixing slower and
faster devices on the same channel. If you are going to share a
channel between a hard disk and an ATAPI device, it is generally a
good idea to make the hard disk the master. In some situations there
can be problems slaving a hard disk to an optical drive; it will
usually work but it is non-standard, and since there is no advantage
to making the ATAPI device the master, the configuration is best
avoided."

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confJumpering-c.html

As I understand it, optical drives aren't even ATA devices. They are
ATAPI devices. That would seem to flout your requirement that we must
maintain the ATA standard across our IDE channels.

[snip]

They flout the ATA standard even more
comprehensively than removable drive bays do.

How so?

Pointless with ATA which is designed to work with ribbon
cables with interleaved grounds for the higher speeds.

So, rounded cables are bad because they cannot guarantee that a
conductor wire will only be next to a ground wire?

[snip]

Sure. At least SATA does support removable drive bays.

Bit hard to find yet tho.

I live in the Dallas area, so it isn't too difficult for me to find
SATA drives and accessories. I'm just not sure I want to pay extra for
them. I was thinking I might find a parallel to serial box that would
allow me to use my current drives as removable SATA drives.

Personally I'd just use a bigger drive as the main boot drive
with a proper boot manager and a firewire or USB2 drive
for the drive that goes in the safe. Trivially buyable now.

Thank you for your suggestions.

 

[Rod Speed]

What am I to make of statements that appear in computer magazines
that say otherwise, such as this one from "Computer World"?

That its out of date. You can prove that any time you like
by using something like HDTach on the hard drive, with
and without the optical drive in the same ribbon cable.

"For the best performance, keep hard drives on the primary
channel ( A) and other drives on the secondary channel ( B).

Mindlessly superficial.

If possible, you should avoid installing a hard drive on
the same channel with a slower optical drive, because
this can limit the hard drive's performance."

And in practice it doesnt with modern motherboard chipsets.

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,102525,pg,2,00.asp

Or, what about the famous "AnandTech"?

"As most of you are well aware, a single IDE channel can
support up to two devices maximum. In order to operate
your drive at Ultra ATA/66 speeds, all of the devices on
that channel must also be Ultra ATA/66 compliant.

Mangled again. And optical drives normally are now anyway.

This means that you will not be able to keep
your old PIO mode 4 CDROM drive or DVD drive

Thats nothing like your original claim about optical
drives in general. Few are PIO mode 4 anymore.

on the same channel as your new Ultra ATA/66
hard drive without hindering performance.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1237&p=2

Pity about the Date: May 16th, 2000 on that.

Or, how about this Web page?

"For performance reasons, it is better to avoid mixing
slower and faster devices on the same channel.

Mindlessly superficial.

If you are going to share a channel between
a hard disk and an ATAPI device, it is generally
a good idea to make the hard disk the master.

More mindlessly superficial stuff and you can prove
that anytime by doing the test I mentioned for yourself.

In some situations there can be problems
slaving a hard disk to an optical drive; it
will usually work but it is non-standard,

Bullshit. And isnt what is being discussed anyway.

and since there is no advantage to
making the ATAPI device the master,

Wrong again.

the configuration is best avoided."

Separate issue entirely to your original claim about data rates.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confJumpering-c.html

Notorious for being well out of date on the detail at times.

As I understand it, optical drives aren't even
ATA devices. They are ATAPI devices.

Irrelevant to that data rate question.

That would seem to flout your requirement that we must
maintain the ATA standard across our IDE channels.

Nope, ATAPI is part of ATA.

How so?

The cable is nothing like what the ATA standard requires.

So, rounded cables are bad because they cannot guarantee
that a conductor wire will only be next to a ground wire?

Yep, thats what the standard requires with 80 wire
cables that are necessary for the faster modes.

I live in the Dallas area, so it isn't too difficult
for me to find SATA drives and accessories.

The problem is with SATA removable drive
bays. They arent that easy to find yet.

I'm just not sure I want to pay extra for them. I was
thinking I might find a parallel to serial box that would allow
me to use my current drives as removable SATA drives.

That would still flout the ATA standard. Not quite
so badly tho because you would only have a single
removable drive bay on a single ATA cable, because
SATA only supports on drive per SATA cable.

And I likely wouldnt even bother with the external drive at
all so it can be put in the safe. I'd use a DVD burner and
keep one set of DVDs offsite for a higher level of protection.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

[snip]

I don't want to do this, though, because that means I have to
put my optical drives on the same channel as my hard drives,
which, I have read, will slow the data rate of the hard drives.

It doesnt.

What am I to make of statements that appear in computer magazines that
say otherwise, such as this one from "Computer World"?

That you either should check everything they write or to keep far away
from them.

"For the best performance, keep hard drives on the primary channel (
A) and other drives on the secondary channel ( B). If possible, you
should avoid installing a hard drive on the same channel with a slower
optical drive, because this can limit the hard drive's performance."

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,102525,pg,2,00.asp

Plain false.

Or, what about the famous "AnandTech"?

"As most of you are well aware, a single IDE channel can support up to
two devices maximum. In order to operate your drive at Ultra ATA/66
speeds, all of the devices on that channel must also be Ultra ATA/66
compliant. This means that you will not be able to keep your old PIO
mode 4 CDROM drive or DVD drive on the same channel as your new Ultra
ATA/66 hard drive without hindering performance.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1237&p=2

That is plain false too.

Or, how about this Web page?

"For performance reasons, it is better to avoid mixing slower and
faster devices on the same channel. If you are going to share a
channel between a hard disk and an ATAPI device, it is generally a
good idea to make the hard disk the master. In some situations there
can be problems slaving a hard disk to an optical drive; it will
usually work but it is non-standard, and since there is no advantage
to making the ATAPI device the master, the configuration is best
avoided."

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confJumpering-c.html

That makes a lot more sense, but is rather more practical
advise than explaining pitfalls on 2 device per channel use.

As I understand it, optical drives aren't even ATA devices.

They are.

They are ATAPI devices.

Which is part of ATA.

That would seem to flout your requirement that we must
maintain the ATA standard across our IDE channels.

Actually, it is the ATA/ATAPI standard.

[snip]

They flout the ATA standard even more
comprehensively than removable drive bays do.

How so?

Only that they don't look like the picture in the ATA/ATAPI standard.

So, rounded cables are bad because they cannot guarantee that a
conductor wire will only be next to a ground wire?

Which isn't so bad as it sounds. Some wires will cross alot
of other wires only for a fraction of the total length.
The twisted wire pairs will make sure of that.

[snip]

Sure. At least SATA does support removable drive bays.

Bit hard to find yet tho.

I live in the Dallas area, so it isn't too difficult for me to find
SATA drives and accessories. I'm just not sure I want to pay extra for
them. I was thinking I might find a parallel to serial box that would
allow me to use my current drives as removable SATA drives.

Personally I'd just use a bigger drive as the main boot drive
with a proper boot manager and a firewire or USB2 drive
for the drive that goes in the safe. Trivially buyable now.

Thank you for your suggestions.

 

[Richard Alexander]

[snip]

The last time I was at Fry's I happened to notice that
they sell SATA removable drive bays and I think they
sell external Firewire and USB hard drive kits.

Thats the route I would take myself, that last, if
you do want to put the drive in a fireproof safe.

I prefer the other approach, dont bother to put full
drive backups in a fireproof safe, just write the stuff
that is irreplaceable to removable media like CDRs
and have one copy offsite. If the house burns down,
I dont care if I have to do a clean reinstall of the OS
and apps, thats a pretty small amount of work compared
with the hassle involved in replacing the house etc.

I live in an apartment. Re-installing all of my aps would be one of my
biggest hassles if my apartment burned down.

Incidentally, my fire retardant safe (one of those ice cooler-sized
boxes from Sam's Club) came with a note saying that it is not safe to
store temperature-sensitive materials in it. Things like photographs,
pearls and compact disks would likely be ruined by the heat in the
safe caused by a major house fire; the paperwork that came with the
safe specifically lists those items as outside the intended scope of
the safe. The way these safes work is that the heat of the fire
actually melts and seals the external, plastic case of the safe. I'm
hoping that metal- or glass-based objects (hard drives) would fair
better, though the plastic parts might be a problem. In any event, the
safes are only really intended to protect paper documents and maybe
metal valuables.

So, I made a special Christmas CD a few years ago that contained all
of my photographs, and mailed them to several of my friends and family
members. Odd, no one wrote me thank-you cards...

[snip]

What makes sense changes over time. Tape has passed
its useby date for personal desktop systems now.

I agree, but, unfortunately, I don't have any other copies of some of
the files stored on my tapes. Nothing on the tapes is worth spending
very much money to recover, but I still would prefer to recover it, if
possible.

[snip]

There's plenty of decent boot managers around.

Which would you suggest?

[snip]

Sure, but thats an entirely separate issue to removable drive bays.

The nice thing about the removable drive bay is that I don't have to
crack open my case, unplug my cables and cords, unscrew the old drive,
screw in the new drive, re-connect the cables and cords and button up
the system. I simply unlock and remove my drive.

[snip]

Mindless bigotry. And you aint even using their non toy OSs.

Hah, I like the story of the Navy ship that was configured to run on
MS Windows NT-based computers, only to be left dead in the water when
NT crashed! I'm a Navy veteran, too.

**********

"'This is the only time this casualty has occurred and the only
propulsion casualty involved with the control system since May 2,
1997, when software configuration was frozen,' Vice Adm. Henry Giffin,
commander of the Atlantic Fleet's Naval Surface Force, reported in an
Oct. 24, 1997, memorandum.

"Giffin wrote the memo to describe 'what really happened in hope of
clearing the scuttlebutt' surrounding the incident, he noted.

"The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its
computers were unable to divide by the number zero, the memo said. The
Yorktown's Standard Monitoring Control System administrator entered
zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program.
That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and
miniature remote terminal units, the memo said.

"The program administrators are trained to bypass a bad data field and
change the value if such a problem occurs again, Atlantic Fleet
officials said.

"But 'the Yorktown's failure in September 1997 was not as simple as
reported,' DiGiorgio said.

"'If you understand computers, you know that a computer normally is
immune to the character of the data it processes,' he wrote in the
June U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings Magazine. 'Your $2.95
calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you try to divide a
number by zero, and does not stop executing the next set of
instructions. It seems that the computers on the Yorktown were not
designed to tolerate such a simple failure.'"

"Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water"
http://www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1998/july13/cov2.htm

**********

Hrm, Microsoft's Windows NT was one of the non-toy OSes, which
currently form the basis of Windows 2000 and Windows XP... Of course,
Microsoft said it wasn't really their fault. That's because Bill Gates
cannot take responsibility for his failures.

I think the comments of an IBM rep (who happens also to like
Microsoft's software a lot) are worth considering. He says that one of
the advantages of the AS/400 computer is that it keeps its data stream
separate from its application stream. Microsoft typically does not,
and it always comes back to bite the user. No software system can be
professional unless it keeps bad data from overrunning application
data; there is no excuse for buffer overflow exploits. There is no
excuse for software that does not gracefully handle processing errors.
Unfortunately, software vendors--and Microsoft is a big one--get away
with selling ill-conceived code, which the public assumes is
high-quality code.

Neither does Linux.

In most cases, you are correct! That in no way negates the fact that
today's software is just so much toy code, masquerading as
professional software. The most generous name I could give it would be
"experimental." Microsoft has long sold beta software as debugged
code; that is common throughout the software industry. For a long
time, Microsoft kept quiet about known issues, until exposed by
outside agents. Recently, they have announced that they are going to
start dealing with these issues, instead of waiting for them to become
a problem before dealing with them.

There was a time when software was written by physicists and other
highly-skilled, careful professionals, whose goal was producing
quality code. The modern business model values quantity over quality.
It is far more important to churn out multiple releases of buggy code
than to turn out any number of releases of rigorously-tested code.
There is a reason that our air traffic systems are 30+ year old, and
it isn't just because of money.

These things I've mentioned are also mentioned in various trade
journals. It has been noted that code burned into hardware often is of
higher quality than code written for sale directly to the public.
Intel had that Pentium bug several years ago; you don't find very many
errors like that in their product.

Now, there are a lot of computer-savvy people who defend Microsoft on
almost every issue I put forward. But, these folks have always had (in
my experience) an ulterior motive, which they usually admit freely.
They like Microsoft because quirky, buggy software means job security
for the techs who service it. I knew a systems administrator who
admitted that he thought it was great that Microsoft's networking
software required specialized training to maintain, because it kept
his pay high. The high tech industry is not where I would have
expected to find Luddites, but that is what many computer industry
techs are--Luddites!

[snip]

Nope.

OK, here's one for you.

I have a 20-Gig Maxtor hard drive with Windows Me on it. I also have a
30-Gig Seagate hard drive with the same version of Windows Me on it.
Both worked in my old 800 MHz Duron machine (the one with a removable
drive bay). But, my 30-Gig drive won't work in my new Athlon 2200+
machine. It isn't the removable bay(s), because I completely
disconnected the removable bays in my new system, and connected the
30-Gig using a standard, flat, 80-conductor cable.

The symptoms are unstable and inconsistent booting, usually to a gray
screen, other times to a completely blank black screen. In the former
case, the mouse cursor moves around a gray rectangle. Nothing else
works.

I booted off my Windows XP CD, and took installation right up short of
formatting the disk. On some boot attempts from the hard drive, I was
able to get my desktop icons, but the screen options were
misconfigured. At least half the time, Windows left blank spaces where
file folders would be in a directory, and attempting to open folders
caused Windows to identify them as an unknown file type.

Eventually, I gave up. I made the 30-Gig a slave and booted from my
20-Gig drive, used Norton and McAfee to clean it up, switched it back
to master and installed it into my old machine. It is happy there. I
can boot from it, listen to music, play my videos and generally use it
as I had been doing. What I cannot do is boot from it in my new
computer.

[snip]

So it cant have been that bad.


And clearly it must have worked well enough
for most to have become the most popular.

I said, "polar," not "popular." Windows Me was one of the LEAST
POPULAR of any Microsoft operating systems.

[snip]

 

[Rod Speed]

I live in an apartment.

Which means the chances of getting burnt out are reduced.

Re-installing all of my aps would be one of my
biggest hassles if my apartment burned down.

Sure, but a ghost image of the OS and apps isnt that big.

Sure, an external firewire hard drive does provide maximum
convenience in that situation, but if you have a shortage of
cash as you appear to have, its one thing that can go because
it isnt something thats very likely to happen so more effort
if the brown stuff does hit the fan isnt a huge problem.

Incidentally, my fire retardant safe (one of those ice
cooler-sized boxes from Sam's Club) came with a
note saying that it is not safe to store temperature-
sensitive materials in it. Things like photographs,
pearls and compact disks would likely be ruined by
the heat in the safe caused by a major house fire;

Sure, but the obvious thing to do with DVDs is to keep one
copy off site so even if the entire building collapses etc,
you still have all the completely irreplaceable stuff safe.

That also protects against the apartment being
looted by thieves who take everything in it too.

the paperwork that came with the safe specifically lists
those items as outside the intended scope of the safe.

Sure, but that doesnt mean that you cant put stuff like DVD
inside something else relatively fireproof inside that safe.

The way these safes work is that the heat of the fire actually
melts and seals the external, plastic case of the safe. I'm
hoping that metal- or glass-based objects (hard drives)
would fair better, though the plastic parts might be a problem.

Yeah, you might be surprised at how badly it does, particularly
if the entire apartment building ends up a pile of smoking rubble.

While thats quite a rare event, offsite backups of what is
completely irreplaceable like your still photos are absolutely
guaranteed to survive even that if they are on DVDs offsite.

In any event, the safes are only really intended to
protect paper documents and maybe metal valuables.

Yeah, quite a bit of jewlery will survive a fire thats not too bad in those.

So, I made a special Christmas CD a few years ago that contained
all of my photographs, and mailed them to several of my friends
and family members. Odd, no one wrote me thank-you cards...

Cant imagine why for the life of me |-)

I agree, but, unfortunately, I don't have any other
copies of some of the files stored on my tapes.

The obvious thing to do is to move them to say DVDs.

Nothing on the tapes is worth spending very much money
to recover, but I still would prefer to recover it, if possible.

Sure, well worth moving to DVDs when you have a burner.

Which would you suggest?

Boot Magic which is part of Partition Magic is pretty decent.

I dont use one much but would try http://www.osloader.com/ if I did.

The nice thing about the removable drive bay is that I don't have
to crack open my case, unplug my cables and cords, unscrew the
old drive, screw in the new drive, re-connect the cables and cords
and button up the system. I simply unlock and remove my drive.

Just as true of an external firewire drive. And that doesnt
flout the standards and you dont get the hassles you are
currently seeing because of that flouting.

And that removal of an internal hard drive when its replaced
by a bigger one is a pretty trivial amount of effort when you
do that so rarely. You've actually had more hassles getting
the removable bays working in your new system.

Hah, I like the story of the Navy ship that was configured
to run on MS Windows NT-based computers, only to be left
dead in the water when NT crashed! I'm a Navy veteran, too.

And you dont see the same storys about Linux when used
in that situation because no one is stupid enough to do that.

Hrm, Microsoft's Windows NT was one of the non-toy OSes,
which currently form the basis of Windows 2000 and Windows
XP... Of course, Microsoft said it wasn't really their fault. That's
because Bill Gates cannot take responsibility for his failures.

Neither does anyone else with the alternatives used either.

It aint the only system thats come rather spectacularly unstuck
due to a software problem and wont be anything like the last.

Any properly designed complete system cant be
brought to its knees by a single point of failure anyway.

Just another complete military stuffup in the basic design.

No point in trying to blame Gates for it.

I think the comments of an IBM rep (who happens also
to like Microsoft's software a lot) are worth considering.

They aint with the personal desktop systems being discussed.

He says that one of the advantages of the AS/400 computer is
that it keeps its data stream separate from its application stream.

Here you're utterly mangling the HARDWARE
which aint designed by Microsoft, and the OS.

Microsoft typically does not, and it
always comes back to bite the user.

Bullshit. Its never bitten me. And I've been
using computers likely since before you
were even born and before Gates was too.

No software system can be professional unless it
keeps bad data from overrunning application data;
there is no excuse for buffer overflow exploits.

Why do you continue to use MS OSs ?

Someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to do that ?

I suggest you call the cops.

There is no excuse for software that does not gracefully
handle processing errors. Unfortunately, software vendors
--and Microsoft is a big one--get away with selling ill-conceived
code, which the public assumes is high-quality code.

See above on that gun being held to your head.

In most cases, you are correct! That in no way negates
the fact that today's software is just so much toy code,
masquerading as professional software.

Why do you use it ?

The most generous name I could give it would be "experimental."

Corse nothing that isnt written by Microsoft is ever that, eh ?

Reams of your utterly mindless rabidly
bigoted ranting flushed where it belongs.

OK, here's one for you.

Doesnt prove a damned thing on that
claim that EVERYONE'S MILAGE VARYS.

Just shows that SOME get a different result to some others.

I have a 20-Gig Maxtor hard drive with Windows Me on it. I also
have a 30-Gig Seagate hard drive with the same version of Windows
Me on it. Both worked in my old 800 MHz Duron machine (the one
with a removable drive bay). But, my 30-Gig drive won't work in my
new Athlon 2200+ machine. It isn't the removable bay(s), because
I completely disconnected the removable bays in my new system,
and connected the 30-Gig using a standard, flat, 80-conductor cable.

The symptoms are unstable and inconsistent booting,
usually to a gray screen, other times to a completely
blank black screen. In the former case, the mouse cursor
moves around a gray rectangle. Nothing else works.

Doesnt prove anything much about ME. It could just
as easily be some quirk of the chipset used in the
Athlon or something as basic as it hasnt been setup
properly or it doesnt like the ram used much etc.

I booted off my Windows XP CD, and took
installation right up short of formatting the disk.

Doesnt prove anything much either, the problems
come later with hardware that XP doesnt like.

On some boot attempts from the hard drive, I was able to get
my desktop icons, but the screen options were misconfigured.
At least half the time, Windows left blank spaces where file
folders would be in a directory, and attempting to open folders
caused Windows to identify them as an unknown file type.

Eventually, I gave up. I made the 30-Gig a slave and booted from
my 20-Gig drive, used Norton and McAfee to clean it up, switched
it back to master and installed it into my old machine. It is happy there.
I can boot from it, listen to music, play my videos and generally use it
as I had been doing. What I cannot do is boot from it in my new computer.

You can get exactly the same problems with Linux too.

I said, "polar," not "popular."

OK, I assumed that was a typo.

Windows Me was one of the LEAST POPULAR
of any Microsoft operating systems.

Bullshit.

 

[Richard Alexander]

[snip]

Nothing on the tapes is worth spending very much money
to recover, but I still would prefer to recover it, if possible.

Sure, well worth moving to DVDs when you have a burner.

Soon, I hope. I am getting lots of overtime at work this holiday week.
I should have enough money to buy a DVD burner from my overtime pay.
Fry's is selling a 4x Sony for about what I made yesterday. I held out
buying it yesterday, because I think the price might drop even lower
after Christmas. I don't want to hold out too long, though, because I
need to use the drive now.

Unfortunately, I still can't access my Iomega tapes. A year or so ago,
I wrote to Iomega, and they were extremely supportive of my efforts,
and said they would do whatever it takes for me to recover my data.
But, the tape software cannot install on my computer (installation
locks up when I try) and the tape drive, as I said, only unwound the
tape from the spindle (I mean, completely unwound off the spindle).

Boot Magic which is part of Partition Magic is pretty decent.

I dont use one much but would try http://www.osloader.com/ if I did.

Thanks for the link.

[snip]

And you dont see the same storys about Linux when used
in that situation because no one is stupid enough to do that.

Oh, maybe they are. As a timely point, the Beagle 2 probe that we hope
to hear landed safely on Mars communicates to Earth via a single Linux
terminal.

"Linux set for Mars landing"
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1151517

There are a lot of other mission-critical applications run on Linux,
too:

"A look at how JPL scientists are using Linux to build better
spacecraft and make accurate calculations."
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3936

"C.N.S. Systems AB (Linkoping, Sweden) announced that it has used
MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition as the operating system
platform within the ground station portion of a new air traffic
control system in Europe."
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3490157051.html

"EMBEDDED LINUX WINS OVER WINDOWS IN WEAPONS TRACKING RESEARCH"
http://lwn.net/2001/1115/pr/pr4338.php3

"Why was Tux a choice draftee? Since the mid-90s, the DoD's COTS
Initiative has mandated standards-based, off-the-shelf procurement.
Defense contractors were forced to move from one-of-a-kind custom
hardware and proprietary software to readily available systems based
on VME and PCs running applications built for open, commercial Unix /
POSIX OS platforms.

"Linux inherited these open systems traditions, providing UNIX / POSIX
compatibility and targeting an unparalleled selection of COTS
hardware, including VME, CompactPCI, and ruggedized motherboards and
notebooks. Until recently, however, defense contractors were hesitant
to base their designs on Linux. Reasons included reservations about
the GPL, security concerns, and the need for real-time responsiveness.
That attitude has changed, due to a number of factors: investments and
education from industry players and publications like Open, and from
the various services themselves. Now the NSA home page features its
own "Security-enhanced Linux" distribution. As for responsiveness,
contractors' own testing and benchmark efforts have revealed that
embedded Linux in its various forms is more than agile enough to
answer the real-time call to action."
http://www.open-mag.com/70329338346.htm

[snip]

Any properly designed complete system cant be
brought to its knees by a single point of failure anyway.

Just another complete military stuffup in the basic design.

No point in trying to blame Gates for it.

Critical applications cannot afford to have software lock-ups. It is
the job of the operating system to ensure that the computer remains
functional, even if an application becomes disabled. The operating
system is supposed to be managing the computer. If Windows NT had been
a robust OS, the "Yorktown" would not have been stranded.

We can tell that software is just a toy by the fact that it cannot be
relied on in critical situations, and by the fact that the software is
not guaranteed. That is true in any other product category; we've just
gotten used to the lack of reliability and lack of ease-of-use.

They aint with the personal desktop systems being discussed.

Maybe the desktop architecture needs to be rethought? Particularly,
maybe we need a category of truly robust microcomputers? By that I
mean, computers that can survive in the real world, doing difficult
jobs in adverse conditions, reliably.

Here you're utterly mangling the HARDWARE
which aint designed by Microsoft, and the OS.

In part. The AS/400 is as much a system of software as a system of
hardware.

Hardware design is not the only way to keep data and applications
separate, and software can inappropriately mix data and application
code. For example, HTML is a well-known kluge, and part of the problem
is that it encourages the mixing of data and code.

Again, there is no excuse for buffer overrun exploits. Properly
designed systems, hardware or software, should be able to handle
buffer overruns gracefully. Unfortunately, this has been a weakness of
the x86 family, but software could be written around it.

Bullshit. Its never bitten me.

I didn't use the word, "user" to refer to individuals, but to all
users collectively.

And I've been
using computers likely since before you
were even born and before Gates was too.

Bill Gates is about 11 years older than me.

Why do you continue to use MS OSs ?

1. My job requires it. My department has standardized on a Microsoft
OS, and plans to continue using a Microsoft OS.

2. I am an OS hobbyist. I collect operating systems. For example, as
soon as I get a chance, I hope to create a boot partition for Solaris.

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/index.html

I have the last commercial release of BeOS, too, as well as a limited
edition "Save BeOS" CD and t-shirt. I still have my Coherent UNIX
floppies and manual, too. I may get an Amiga box, and I'm certainly
interested in an Apple Mac G5 (all it takes is money).

3. Microsoft is ubiquitous. Whether I like it or not, it is not
practical for me to ignore an OS that runs on 90% of all desktops.

4. Some of the software I use requires it. Partition Magic, for
example, only installs on Microsoft Windows. Even the most recent
versions of Partition Magic requires some version of Microsoft Windows
for installation.

5. Don't assume that I am not trying to reduce my dependence on
Microsoft.

Someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to do that ?

I suggest you call the cops.

Somebody did. That's why Microsoft has been defending itself in courts
of law a lot...

[snip]

Why do you use it ?

I am unwilling to forgo computer use just because the perfect system
has not been built.

Corse nothing that isnt written by Microsoft is ever that, eh ?

I resent paying for a professional, final product, only to find that I
have been sold a crude toy for the price of a professional, final
product.

I can pay around $200 for Windows XP Professional upgrade, or,
directly across the aisle, pay $80 for SuSE Linux 9 Professional.
Windows XP is not that much better (if at all) than Linux 9.

[snip]

 

[Rod Speed]

Soon, I hope. I am getting lots of overtime at work this holiday
week. I should have enough money to buy a DVD burner from
my overtime pay. Fry's is selling a 4x Sony for about what I
made yesterday. I held out buying it yesterday, because I think
the price might drop even lower after Christmas. I don't want
to hold out too long, though, because I need to use the drive now.

Unfortunately, I still can't access my Iomega tapes. A year
or so ago, I wrote to Iomega, and they were extremely
supportive of my efforts, and said they would do whatever
it takes for me to recover my data. But, the tape software
cannot install on my computer (installation locks up when I try)

I'd try it on a clean install of whatever OSs you have to try that with.

and the tape drive, as I said, only unwound the tape from
the spindle (I mean, completely unwound off the spindle).

That last is usually just a dirty end of tape sensor.

Oh, maybe they are. As a timely point, the Beagle
2 probe that we hope to hear landed safely on Mars
communicates to Earth via a single Linux terminal.

Its just gone missing. Funny that.

If they actually were stupid enough
to allow a single point of failure...

"Linux set for Mars landing"
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1151517

Thats just the ground end.

Reams of rabid Linux bigotry flushed where it belongs.

Critical applications cannot afford to have software lock-ups.

Any properly designed complete system cant be
brought to its knees by a single point of failure.


Just another complete military stuffup in the basic design.

No point in trying to blame Gates for it.

Reams more rabid bigotry flushed where it belongs.

Maybe the desktop architecture needs to be rethought?

Or perhaps not. Linux certainly aint managed that.

Particularly, maybe we need a category of truly robust microcomputers?

Been there for many years where they are necessary.

By that I mean, computers that can survive in the real
world, doing difficult jobs in adverse conditions, reliably.

No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you
to use anything that causes you to hold your nose.

Reams more pig ignorant rabid bigotry flushed where it belongs.

Bill Gates is about 11 years older than me.
Figures.

1. My job requires it.

Not a home it doesnt.

My department has standardized on a Microsoft
OS, and plans to continue using a Microsoft OS.

Like it or lump it. Or keep pig ignorantly baying at the moon.

2. I am an OS hobbyist. I collect operating systems. For example, as
soon as I get a chance, I hope to create a boot partition for Solaris.

I have the last commercial release of BeOS, too, as well as a limited
edition "Save BeOS" CD and t-shirt. I still have my Coherent UNIX
floppies and manual, too. I may get an Amiga box, and I'm certainly
interested in an Apple Mac G5 (all it takes is money).

You'll have to pardon me if I dont actually swoon.

3. Microsoft is ubiquitous. Whether I like it or not, it is not
practical for me to ignore an OS that runs on 90% of all desktops.

Your problem. You could always slash your wrists or something.

4. Some of the software I use requires it.

Then stop using that software if you dont like MS OSs.

Partition Magic, for example, only installs on Microsoft Windows.

Even you should be able to find something for Linux.

Even the most recent versions of Partition Magic requires
some version of Microsoft Windows for installation.

See above.

5. Don't assume that I am not trying to
reduce my dependence on Microsoft.

Didnt 'assume' a thing. You cant be trying very hard
if you havent managed to find an alternative PM.

Somebody did.

Not for holding a gun to anyone's head and
forcing them to use an MS product they didnt.

That's why Microsoft has been defending itself in courts of law a lot...

Mindless bigot fantasy.

I am unwilling to forgo computer use just
because the perfect system has not been built.

And it never will be, you watch.

I resent paying for a professional, final product,
only to find that I have been sold a crude toy
for the price of a professional, final product.

Then refuse to buy it, stupid.

I dont expect we will ever see reports of MS employees
pouring from their windows like lemmings if you dont.

I can pay around $200 for Windows XP Professional upgrade, or,
directly across the aisle, pay $80 for SuSE Linux 9 Professional.
Windows XP is not that much better (if at all) than Linux 9.

Bullshit.

 

[n/a]

I've read through this thread and it just seems to me that Rob is a
strict adherent to the ATA standard -- does this necessarily mean
removeable drive bays will cause problems? Who knows. I think all Rob is
saying is you take more risk using removeable drive bays... so for any
serious machine you'd avoid it, right?

 

[Rod Speed]

I've read through this thread and it just seems to me that
Rob is a strict adherent to the ATA standard -- does this
necessarily mean removeable drive bays will cause problems?

Richard has already commented on a problem he has seen.

Who knows. I think all Rob is saying is you take
more risk using removeable drive bays... so for
any serious machine you'd avoid it, right?

More that when there is a way of getting a removable
drive without flouting the standards, like with sata or
firewire or usb, thats the only sensible approach.