Uncreative Labs

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

i got it working in my 386 by the way, im using it as a second drive for data, all those .wav .avi files take up space. it is not a hardware problem in the 386 that gona hold me back. this machine supports drives up to 120 gb, no joke, with out overlay. as for using the 68gb of usible space, i found an ntfs driver for it, it supports both read and write.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

Puckdropper wrote:

The early hard drives were known to have bad sectors from the factory. Some of them have bad sector lists printed on them. I've got a ST251 with almost none, but my ST225 has about 18 or so.

It wasn't until later that they developed the technology enough to produce drives without bad sectors. I think most IDE drives are bad sector free from the factory, but don't quote me.

Actually most modern drives have a LOT of bad sectors. Starting with IDE drives, all bad sectors up to a point of no return were automatically masked and rerouted by the drives internal drivetable and bios.

Some drives have up to .5% of their total capacity masked and hidden to be used for rerouting bad sectors. This is a HUGE amount but it saves a user from finding a bad sector on their hard drive instead SMART detects and reroutes the bad sector so you don't see it but you may still get a lockup during the process.

So drives really aren't as flawless as they seem they just are slightly underrated for capacity and the drive automatically hides the bad sectors.

This is why an IDE drive generally can't be low leveled because the internal bios handles a lot of randomly positioned sectors, thats also why some drives have strange hickups in performance in certain areas of the drive.

Cheers

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

I can easily believe that what the guy above says is very true, actually, I read somewhere that we literally RELY on ECC (Error Correction) in the case of Hard Drives these days, and that it has evolved well enough to make it appear as though the hard drives are poerfectly fine, when really it's the same chaos to be had in 1988 going on (only on a much more grand scale), it's just the ECC built into the hard drive is utilized so much and so well it gives the illusion things are fine.

I can belive the ECC stuff that's for sure, ALL of my CD-ROM Equipped machines regardless of age are being upgraded (Allbeit slowly) to CD-RW or DVD-RW drives of various brands because the ECC is so good in them, and because I can burn, sometimes even the entire hard disk to a little plexiglass circle.