Ville Syrjälä wrote:
quoted text
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 02:33:29AM +0100, Krzysztof Halasa wrote:
>> Zan Lynx <zlynx@acm.org> writes:
>>
>>> In my experience what they needed was proper cooling.  I have a 3ware
>>> RAID-5 array of 4 120 GB DeskStar drives still working.
>> I think the largest "deathstars" (75GXP?) were 75 GB.
> 
> AFAIK there were basically two series of deathstars. The original
> DTLA<something> and the more recent IC35<something>. The IC35 series
> were bigger (120GB is the most common size I've seen for those).
> Proper cooling and firmware upgrade usually fixed the deathstarness on
> both series. I still have some of both, not in active use for a year or
> two but still working. As a strange coincidence I was just pulling out
> some old data from them yesterday.
..

The original Deathstar ailment had nothing to do with firmware or cooling.
But rather, a bad batch of chips that IBM had the misfortune to use a lot of.

The chips would grow tiny internal whiskers over a period of 2+ years,
and eventually short circuit themselves.

My last one died here just a few weeks ago, after sitting on the shelf
for nearly all of it's life.  Never more than perhaps 40 power-on hours total,
and never enough to get very warm.

Cheers

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