StarDestroyer.Net BBS

picked up a freebie IBM Ultrastar 18.2 (DDYS-T18350) LVD/SE SCSI 10krpm drive yesterday, built in april 2001. just one little issue, some dip smashed the power connector. this was a $400 drive last year if i remember right... would have been under warrantee, but IBM doesn't RMA physically damaged hardware... and the drive works perfectly so far on every test.

here's the damage:


btw, this drive not only runs like a bat out of hell, and it's one of the ones which uses the new glass substrate discs... pretty kickass...

for the repair i removed the smashed connector and cut away the damaged casing, then soldered in the same type of connector (female molex) that i snipped off of a cooling fan.



works fine. took it 20 minutes to do a low-level format, just under 5 minutes to do a full disk verification. and just over 30 seconds for partitioning...

now to run it thru the format...

tests as followed:

disk verification in 4 minutes 58 seconds
low-level in 21 minutes 35 seconds
partition in 32 seconds
format in 9 minutes 46 seconds

all tests passed, drive has no failures.

It looks like a tiny city!

Its Tokyo 3!... err... umm... good show, couldn't have done better myself. Now all you have to do is put it through the Fortnight Test

Thats pretty cool. Nice way to save some money.

Larz wrote:Its Tokyo 3!... err... umm... good show, couldn't have done better myself. Now all you have to do is put it through the Fortnight Test

i figure if it makes it thru 24 hours worth of running it'll last indefinately, and besides, my experience with SCSI has been that they're either hard dead or will run till doomsday.

TrailerParkJawa wrote:Thats pretty cool. Nice way to save some money.

i'm getting rather spoiled by the speed really quick...

Cyril wrote:It looks like a tiny city!

They all do...

Hyperion wrote:i figure if it makes it thru 24 hours worth of running it'll last indefinately, and besides, my experience with SCSI has been that they're either hard dead or will run till doomsday.

Same with D-Link Ethernet cards...

Nice deal. I know someone who got a 800 dollar mower for 100 because it had some rust damage, which took 20 minutes to fix and paint over.

Sea Skimmer wrote:Nice deal. I know someone who got a 800 dollar mower for 100 because it had some rust damage, which took 20 minutes to fix and paint over.

knowing how to fix stuff is the best way to save a buttload of money.

Some people get all the luck...

DPDarkPrimus wrote:Some people get all the luck...

LOL, not really, i got very lucky on that drive and the GF2 from the same box, but i didn't get so lucky on the damned A7V133, fucker won't run the new GF2 MX400 board i got at AGP 4x, it will do 2x though, but at 4x it gets really buggy and starts crashing on UT.

Hyperion wrote:LOL, not really, i got very lucky on that drive and the GF2 from the same box, but i didn't get so lucky on the damned A7V133, fucker won't run the new GF2 MX400 board i got at AGP 4x, it will do 2x though, but at 4x it gets really buggy and starts crashing on UT.

That's the VIA Athlon chipset, right? Hm. I heard about some issues with it, and went with the SiS 735. Pretty stable, although I had to tweak the front-side bus speeds around a bit before it worked well.

you want to buy it? it passes all tests with flying colors, it's stable and runs very well until you put a "powercolor" GF2 MX400 in it on 4x AGP mode...

Hyperion wrote:you want to buy it? it passes all tests with flying colors, it's stable and runs very well until you put a "powercolor" GF2 MX400 in it on 4x AGP mode...

Nah, I'm not interested in any more computer hardware right now.

Hyperion wrote:i figure if it makes it thru 24 hours worth of running it'll last indefinately, and besides, my experience with SCSI has been that they're either hard dead or will run till doomsday.

Yeah, I have a 20MB external SCSI drive that's from some time in the early to mid '90's. Still worked, last time I used it (looking for some old journals and a database file). Of course, it's worthless now. Funny too, it's larger than most desktop CPUs out now...

Drewcifer wrote:

Hyperion wrote:i figure if it makes it thru 24 hours worth of running it'll last indefinately, and besides, my experience with SCSI has been that they're either hard dead or will run till doomsday.

Yeah, I have a 20MB external SCSI drive that's from some time in the early to mid '90's. Still worked, last time I used it (looking for some old journals and a database file). Of course, it's worthless now. Funny too, it's larger than most desktop CPUs out now...

got an ancient HDD from a late 70's IBm ANALOG server.

When I was a kid, my dad brought home a platter from something like that. It was ~2-3 feet in diameter and easily 1/4 inch thick!

Nice. My high school has dozens of them for A/V work (along with bigger versions). A few of them were DOA or dead shortly after use (and this particular order was the same one CNN had!) but otherwise they're rock solid and hella fast.