Xref: utzoo comp.sys.amiga:75815 comp.sys.amiga.tech:17458 Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!apple!portal!cup.portal.com!thad From: thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: HD Errors Message-ID: <37583@cup.portal.com> Date: 5 Jan 91 00:55:48 GMT References: <37492@cup.portal.com> <1991Jan2.190655.15790@jato.jpl.nasa.gov> <1991Jan3.141624.25450@forwiss.uni-passau.de> <1991Jan3.230319.3648@jato.jpl.nasa.gov> <7455@sugar.hackercorp.com> <1991Jan4.191249.14442@jato.jpl Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 72 jdickson@jato.jpl.nasa.gov (Jeff Dickson) in <1991Jan4.191249.14442@jato.jpl.nasa.gov> writes: tough s___! These UNIX boxes you cite their manafactures have been around for a lot longer than the Amiga has - so their products are quite mature. Plus, there is quite a cost difference between the SUN Sparc and an Amiga. I don't know how you can realistically compare the two. As the Amiga matures so will its file system. I was curious about what a Sparc Station would cost. The barebones without a hard disk is $4995. Didn't see the prices for systems with disks...I estimate that they start around $7000. What does price have to do with it? Once, in a sadistic mood, I "played" with one of the office IBM-PCs (actually an IBM machine) and rebooted it perhaps 30 times in one hour while writing to its HD. Not any problems at all. Robust file system. Several of my UNIX systems are AT&T's 3B1, a 68010-based demand-paged virtual memory system that is contemporary with the Amiga ... both came out in 1985 and appear so much alike one would think they were two models from the same company (e.g. same color, keyboard garages, 2 or 3 button mouse, choice of windowing menu or command-line interfaces, etc.); point being, I can do "bad" things to the 3B1 and NOT trash the file system. And one person in the Silicon Valley AT&T UNIX Users' Group did do a real nasty: mounted the file system as a partition of itself. He, of course, panicked when things started going ape, so he brought his machine to the Users' Group meeting and Jim Sanchez and I spent a few minutes with fsck and his system was up and running again with NO loss of any important files and no need to reformat and reload (this was one year ago and that system is still running fine). Now, contrast all the above with all the HD laments in this newsgroup, and one would easily draw the conclusion that if you stare cross-eyed at or sneeze in the same room as an Amiga the filesystem will go belly up, requiring reformatting and reloading from a backup. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| THIS IS THE ISSUE ABOUT WHICH EVERYONE is rightfully concerned, and was why I made the comment about the fragility of the Amiga's filesystem. As another example, I built a complete HD subsystem for an Amiga owned by a colleage in my office. I tested it for two weeks in my lab and it was rock solid, never a problem. If he uses it for more than 2 minutes, he starts getting HD errors requiring reformatting. I bring it back, works fine for me. He tries it again, it goes belly up. After three iterations, I said "to hell with this" and recommended he get a Mac, which he did, and now he left and formed his own company ("Abra-Mac-Dabra") and is doing a booming business and has no HD errors (he simply was NOT an "Amiga" person :-) He gave the Amiga to his son who IS an "Amiga" person and is able to use the SAME system with no problems whatsoever. You figure! :-) And in my own case, I don't get any HD errors, but then I run "safe" software (as I discussed in comp.sys.amiga.tech) and I run my Amiga systems with proper surge protection and UPS power backups 24 hrs/day, 7 days/week. I do do regular backups because I anticipate the system will fail at some point, but at least it won't be a disaster when it does. And, as a side note, several of my UNIX boxes have never been backed up but I don't anticipate any problems should a HD error occur ... simply because the filesystem isn't as fragile as that on the Amiga. It was the EXTREMELY high rate of HD errors and failures that I've seen with the Amiga (and which you see in this newsgroup and on BBS systems) that influenced my company's decision to not continue developing our products under AmigaDOS. SVR4 on the Amiga is a different beast and one with which I can feel comfortable doing my company's software on an Amiga platform. It's one thing for a system to crash while playing a game, but such a crash while running a $10,000+ software package performing a company's business is simply not acceptable or tolerable. Thad Floryan [ thad@cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]