More HP hard drive stories. My programmer used to work for a cancer software company here. All the bigwigs got new HP laptops, and one with a French keyboard was inadvertantly sent along with all the English keyboards, none of the suits wanted it, they didn't return it, so it became his.
Had it over here one day to do some LAN gaming and was looking at the extended functions on the function keys. We were trying to figure out what the glyph of the stack of pancakes over F12 meant. Hmm... BLUE FUNCTION-F12... oh, parks the drive heads, coolie... now... unpark... no, really, unpark... uh, shazaam. No dice. The heads are probably still parked on that sucker in a landfill.
Few days ago three of us were discussing hard drive manufacturers, about 12 years each of PC use (that's PC-compatible, not Personal Computer, we all came from Motorola/Mac or Sun/SPARC and CBM before that) netted us about 13 Western Digital drives that we can remember (I account for 6 of them - I still have the model and serial numbers written down for them). Of those 13, only 5 were retired before malfunctioning. Only one of us has ever killed a non-WD drive, bro packed in a Samsung IDE in his Frankenmac blue & white G3.
Longest runtime depends on your definition - I'm a daily user of two Quantum Fireball 20GB that I've taken with me to all my primary work systems since I broke the 1GHz barrier, about 6 years ago. One of the other guys has a pair of IBM Deathst... er, Darkstars that are older, but are in a secondary computer.
Bren R.
