I've delayed replying to get the overall picture...thanx to all who put in
on the 'click_of_death' thing. Based on all I've (now) read on this, it
seems I've unknowingly avoided most issues said to be part of this
scenario...though you get a hint of 'pot luck' in regards who it affects.,
or more precisely, which units. Does the fault span the total range of
zip_100's??...ie; SCSI, IDE, & PAR??
In all honesty, I was cautious
about buying a removeable media drive at all...ugly visions of customers
faces when told their syquest had turned into a cartridge munching monster
and such. Notwithstanding, I still bought one, but when I got it home, it
refused to work at all. The dealer replaced it without quibble, and like I
say, this (external scsi) unit has done over 2 years without flaw...caveat
to a couple of things. Firstly, it started out as my backup drive for my
amiga setup, wherein I really did treat it (still do) as highly suspicious
magic not to be trusted against Murphey's voodoo....so data was only ever
backedup to the carts, then cased & stored, then any stuff I later
subsequently thought was worth keeping, was taken from the carts and burnt
to cdrom (when it's here on loan ;)...then the carts reformatted and round
we go again.
Only lately has the zip-drive melded onto my linux scsichain,
but pretty much with the same intent as described above....it's only a
temp backup storage medium, and not something I use everyday like a
hardrive say. To be clever (thought I), I would continue with amiga FFS on
the carts to maintain an air of compatibility. This has all worked fine.
One day about 2months ago, this click-of-death thing as described, was
probably what had me thinking I had a bad_track or something...but it was
not upon insertion, it was midway through a 10Mb file-copy. It was like a
bad floppy disk thing...hunting back and forwards looking for data. I let
it go and after 15sec or so, it continued. The file copied successfully. I
left the cart in and copied off the rest of the files (to be safe), and
decided to make that cart ext2 instead...more an impulsive thing done
rather than thoughtful. It formatted fine and I copied back down to it. No
problems.
I haven't seen a recurrence of this yet, but thinking about it,
it's probably linked together in the grey area of 'cause'. From another
angle..I've often mused how a drive that rattles, clucks, seems to have
such a flimsy grip of the cartridge, manages accurate head-disk alignment
anyhow...obviously one of the major concerns of such a system. Seems to
me, this is probably where this trouble stems from, though filthy carts
and damaged surfaces don't help.
...maybe I should be quiet...mine's LONG out of warranty..
Cheers!
Db
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