Ventura County Computers Eletter

Hard drives driven hard and hard driving computer techs.

Just as I think I might have a month with nothing to rant about something always happens to get me going and this month was no exception. Recently our head technician left for greener pastures (and more money) and guess who now spends most of his time in the workshop? Toby? Not! My partner never met a computer he could recognize. The comment "They all look alike" comes up a lot in conversation. No, our beloved Toby tries to stay as far away from a screwdriver as possible, for good reason. So it's left up to yours truly to pick up the slack and attempt to fix all the problems that come my way which leads me to this months story.

One of the most amazing and overlooked components of a modern day PC is what is referred to as the hard disk drive. This name evolved from I guess being the opposite of a "soft disk drive" of the somewhat antiquated 5 1/4 floppy disk. Which many of you old farts have been around long enough to have used them once upon a time. When I talk about stuff like this to the young aspiring computer techs they just give back a blank stare with the words, Huh? But I'm getting off track here. The "Hard Drive" is a wonder of electro-mechanical engineering, which by design has stood the test of time and has not changed much in recent years. Excepting the cooling fans this is really the only constantly moving component in a PC. And as everyone knows who have every owned an automobile, anything that has moving parts will fail sooner or later. Most disk drives are rated for over 100,000 hours of operation. That's pretty good for any device. IF you ever can take one apart without destroying it and watch it work, the disk (or platters) go round n round while the heads suspended on little arms furiously skitter back and forth reading magnetically charged particles in the disk of positive and negative charged. Or imagine these particles as a rods lined up either vertical or horizontal. All your precious data and everything that makes a computer what it is all comes down to Plus or minuses or on and off.

Needless to say this busy device is susceptible to all sorts of stuff that will interfere with it normal operating life. What is that you say? I'm glad you asked. The first and most obvious is shock from sudden movement. Have you ever watched the UPS man unload his truck on a bad day? Who knows how many times the box was dropped by the pimply faced stock clerk at COMP USA? The R/W heads ride on a cushion of air about the width of a human hair over disks spinning as 7200rpm. They don't like being dropped but hold up surprisingly well anyway. The 2nd reason is, you guessed it, SHOCK again! Electrical shock or another buzz word, dirty power. Everything runs on 12V DC so the cleaner the power the smoother the operation. What really hurts these babies is a power drop or under voltage. This can screw up your data in a hurry.

Now that you know all this stuff lets get back to the rant because I'm running out of precious print space. Since I am now in charge of returns or RMA's, I needed to warranty a Seagate 80GB 7200RPM SATA NCQ hard drive. These drives now have an unprecedented warranty of 5 years. Pretty darn good if you ask me. I got a fellow named hashish on the phone who said I should just warranty it on the web. Well, can I just do it now since I have you one the line, OK. I want an advance shipment. (this is where you give a credit card number and they send the drive out first and you return it in the package provided.) That will be $25.00 for 2 day. I don't want to spend any money get it! Yes sir. I cannot take your credit card info and some one will call you within 48 hours. OK, if that's the way it is but it doesn't make any sense to me. I'm sorry sir. Stop apologizing damnit. three days later and no phone call. I called and spoke to mishmash this time and for $25.00 they will send it out. No, I don't want to spend $25.00. OK It will take one week if the drive is in stock. OK. A week later the package arrives and what does the drive have as it's label. FACTORY REFURBISHED PRODUCT. Oh great, I sent in a brand new drive. It costs me $6.00 plus time and effort to return a NEW product and I get this. How would you like to have this drive installed in your computer? I could get sued for selling used parts. Now you know why we need to make over $5.00 on the sale of an item. Being in this business isn't always fun and easy.

Finally, to wrap up this story. We received a DELL computer that had been in a fire. It was scorched and smoke damaged and didn't work too well. I took the hard drive out and it was an 80GB Seagate ATA133 drive 7200rpm. It was scorched and smelly so I cleaned it up a little and hooked it up and the thing works great. I use it as a shop drive. So as much as I want to bad mouth the company's product support policies they do make a good drive. But next time I'll just do it on the web because companies don't want to talk to their customers or even their resellers for that matter. If you want confirmation of what I mean just ask ANDY TOTH about SOYO motherboards and listen to his tales of woe.

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Hard drives driven hard and hard driving computer techs.

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