[SpamCop-Geeks] Re: [Media] MS-DOS Paternity Dispute Goes to Court

[Bert Driehuis]

On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 00:18:35 -0500
eddie <eddie at eddie.web> wrote:

> On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 05:37:33 +0100, Bert Driehuis scratched out the
> following:
[...]
> > Professionals in those days would never shut down their DOS PC's
> > without parking the hard disk!
> 
> There were professionals in those days? I never parked a hard disk and
> nothing ever happened. Either they parked themselves as the power went
> down or they were simply built better than today's disks. Yes, there
> were parking utilities, but I never bothered. When I was done, I
> turned off the power.
> Actually, I can do that today with my SuSE and OSX boxes but I don't.
> Now, you see, I am a professional :)

Ah, but modern disks are for weenies! They have capacitors that store
enough power to flush the cache to disk before spinning down (at least,
that's the theory: I have seen modern disks developing bad sectors [that
go away when rewriting them] as a result of power outages).

On older MFM disks, I've seen entire tracks wiped as a result of a power
failure at the wrong time. I have seen an expensive 40MB disk die when
its owner said parking was for wimps and showed me it didn't matter (as
it turns out, the disk survived the shaking itself, but when the arm
crashed into the parking mechanism it would never release the arm; we
got the data off by removing the cover and the parking mechanism but the
disk died soon after that unsubtle repair).

The disk throwing record that year was something like 40MB for 6
meters.