fischer-michael@YALE.ARPA (Michael Fischer) (07/15/87)
Moshe Braner <braner@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu> writes: > My personal impression is that the current day hard disks are > _unreliable_. As a group. Now could somebody out there arrange > an Atari ST <--> Micro Bernoulli connection? (Removable, 5", 20Meg, > flexible, durable cartridges!) Meanwhile, _please_ do not put any > valuable data on a hard disk. Use it for work copies of programs that > you already have on floppies. Put you data on two (or more) floppies > and upload it to some mainframe too... I believe this is a serious overstatement that may mislead people into foregoing the advantages of hard disks out of unwarranted fear. I have two Atari SH204 20-meg hard disks, one 11 months old and the other 1 month old, and neither has given me any problem whatsoever. This isn't to say that failures cannot happen; hard disks can and do crash, just as floppies can fail. Moshe's advice to back up ALL valuable data should be heeded, no matter what kind of device the data is stored on. 3 copies are much better than two, for a common mistake is to discover an error while backing up a master copy and find that the old backup copy has already been destroyed by the backup process. A good rule of thumb is, "Never have all your copies simultaneously mounted on the same machine." *** EXTINGUISHER ON *** I have flamed at Atari numerous times in the past for the sorry state of their software, but I would like to commend them for the high quality of their hardware. I have bought 5 complete ST systems over the past two years and never had a failure (except one time that water dripped into a running 1040). I may just be lucky, and I don't really expect it to continue indefinitely, but it is nevertheless an enviable reliability record for any kind of computer and especially outstanding for a low-priced machine. *** EXTINGUISHER OFF *** --Mike Fischer <fischer@yale.arpa> -------