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#1
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Obsolete computer...trivia
I recently scrapped out a 386 that had been setup as a voice mail system.
I decided to open it up and have a look before it went to the recycler and was surprised to find a 1GB IDE hard drive in that thing. So...the machine must have been a lot newer than I thought. When looking at the file dates it appears the machine was used around 1997 or so. When I Googled I was surprised to see that 386 cpus were still manufactured up until 2007 (for embedded systems) |
#2
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Obsolete computer...trivia
philo wrote:
I recently scrapped out a 386 that had been setup as a voice mail system. I decided to open it up and have a look before it went to the recycler and was surprised to find a 1GB IDE hard drive in that thing. So...the machine must have been a lot newer than I thought. When looking at the file dates it appears the machine was used around 1997 or so. When I Googled I was surprised to see that 386 cpus were still manufactured up until 2007 (for embedded systems) Did you bench that IDE drive in HDTune ? I bet it has a smokin transfer rate. Probably good for 4-5MB/sec. As for the manufacturer of obsolete hardware, it gets hard to do that after a while, since they tear down the fab and the ability to make it disappears. I had a project at work, stopped before the end of the sales cycle, when the fab making the custom ICs was torn down. We would have needed to buy and stockpile a huge pile of ICs, which is "risky" from a business point of view. They usually give you a year of advanced warning, that the fab is becoming a hole in the ground. One place the old processors are preferred, is for space applications. Where the large geometry chips are more resistant to radiation upset. But I doubt anyone was doing that with 386. They've used some weird stuff for space. For example, the stuff on this page for sale today, is running at 25MHz. "Open the Pod Bay doors HAL..." http://synova.com/proc/processors.html Paul |
#3
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Obsolete computer...trivia
On 11/03/2015 07:26 PM, Paul wrote:
I bet it has a smokin transfer rate. Probably good for 4-5MB/sec. I did not bench mark the drive but it ran msdos 6.22 just fine. I save small hard drives for older machines that I put Linux on. Now another question: The drive had a bad sector that was mapped out by scandisk. If I would re-use the drive for dos or Windows, I assume the OS would not try to use that sector...but does scan disk map it out just for ms-based operating systems...or is it mapped out at a lower level? My question is if I used the drive for Linux would that bad sector cause a problem? My guess is that scan disk only maps it out for MS operating systems. What I did was use both test disk and d-revitalize to attempt to make that bad sector invisible to any OS. I again ran scandisk and it shows no bad sectors. Can I assume it's been mapped-out at a lower lever than the OS? As for the manufacturer of obsolete hardware, it gets hard to do that after a while, since they tear down the fab and the ability to make it disappears. I had a project at work, stopped before the end of the sales cycle, when the fab making the custom ICs was torn down. We would have needed to buy and stockpile a huge pile of ICs, which is "risky" from a business point of view. They usually give you a year of advanced warning, that the fab is becoming a hole in the ground. One place the old processors are preferred, is for space applications. Where the large geometry chips are more resistant to radiation upset. But I doubt anyone was doing that with 386. They've used some weird stuff for space. For example, the stuff on this page for sale today, is running at 25MHz. "Open the Pod Bay doors HAL..." http://synova.com/proc/processors.html Paul |
#4
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Obsolete computer...trivia
philo wrote:
On 11/03/2015 07:26 PM, Paul wrote: I bet it has a smokin transfer rate. Probably good for 4-5MB/sec. I did not bench mark the drive but it ran msdos 6.22 just fine. I save small hard drives for older machines that I put Linux on. Now another question: The drive had a bad sector that was mapped out by scandisk. If I would re-use the drive for dos or Windows, I assume the OS would not try to use that sector...but does scan disk map it out just for ms-based operating systems...or is it mapped out at a lower level? My question is if I used the drive for Linux would that bad sector cause a problem? My guess is that scan disk only maps it out for MS operating systems. What I did was use both test disk and d-revitalize to attempt to make that bad sector invisible to any OS. I again ran scandisk and it shows no bad sectors. Can I assume it's been mapped-out at a lower lever than the OS? At the sector level, the disk has automatic sparing, as a feature of the IDE controller. If a bad sector is detected, a spare is used in its place. If the drive runs out of (local) spare sectors, the sector is then un-repairable. The drive returns "CRC error" when the sector is read. Now, it's up to the file system to mark it. The file system uses a sparse file, which keeps track of sectors or clusters with CRC errors. That's how it would take a bad area out of circulation. The "real space on disk" taken by the sparse file, grows with the more bad areas it needs to map. Even though the virtual size of the file is as large as the disk, space is only actually used to store that file, when there is a need to mark an area of the disk as bad. You would need to research the various file system types, to see what mechanisms they use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat Bad blocks Cluster tagging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs Bad blocks $BadClus (MFT Record) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_system Bad blocks Table So it looks lkke they all have some sort of mechanism. Another way to handle the issue (for the simplest cases), is to move the partition so it does not sit on top of the bad area. I had one disk, where all the "trouble" was in a single well defined area. For that disk, it would be feasible to move the partitions away from there. And then I would only lose around 14% of the drive capacity. Paul |
#5
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Obsolete computer...trivia
Paul writes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_system Bad blocks Table For ext4 (and the older ext2 and ext3) in Linux specifically, one can give the -c option to mkfs.ext4 when creating the file system so that it'll scan the drive for bad blocks and map them out if any are found. Alternatively this can also be done with fsck -cc to an existing file system. With a quick look it seems other file systems one might want to use on Linux (xfs, btrfs, f2fs, zfs) don't have a similar thing. |
#6
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Obsolete computer...trivia
On 11/04/2015 12:17 AM, Paul wrote:
snipped but read .. X I had one disk, where all the "trouble" was in a single well defined area. For that disk, it would be feasible to move the partitions away from there. And then I would only lose around 14% of the drive capacity. Paul Yep , I've done that already back in the old days. |
#7
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Obsolete computer...trivia
Anssi Saari wrote:
Paul writes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_system Bad blocks Table For ext4 (and the older ext2 and ext3) in Linux specifically, one can give the -c option to mkfs.ext4 when creating the file system so that it'll scan the drive for bad blocks and map them out if any are found. Alternatively this can also be done with fsck -cc to an existing file system. With a quick look it seems other file systems one might want to use on Linux (xfs, btrfs, f2fs, zfs) don't have a similar thing. I can sorta understand their reasoning. Running a drive when it shows CRC errors, is just asking for trouble. On a modern drive, you may not have a lot of time between "CRC error" and "completely unresponsive". Years ago, when I had failing Maxtor drives, I'd get symptoms on Monday, and the drive would be dead on Tuesday :-) I don't take chances any more. Too many unhappy Tuesdays. Paul |
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