IBM gets out of hard drive business...

[apriest]

How long ago did Hitachi buy out IBMs hard drive line? I hope their notebook performance and stability stays as good as when IBM was running the show...

 

[bozo1]

Like last summer.

 

[buleyb]

IBM is in some 3yr transition with Hitachi, but for now, they are still developing and producing. After, they'll still have a good percentage of the joint venture...

And yes, I hope Hitachi brings stability back to the Deskstar line (although they'll probably rename it to something stupid to solve that problem).

 

[apriest]

Wow, I never knew all this. No wonder I had such a hard time with next day replacement on my Ultrastar SCSI drives. "We don't do that anymore". My ass you don't, it says right here in my warrantee that you WILL do that. I have a server down becuase 3 drives out of a RAID 5 server crapped. I haven't done much with IBM since. I was rather shocked as I've never had such trouble with RMA's before. They tried to tell me it would take a minimum of 15 days. Must be because of this merger. I'd hate to go back to Seagate for high end SCSI drives though. No one seems to be doing anything good these days, with the exception of WDs 8MB "JB special edition" IDE series. Those rock!

 

[buleyb]

Yeah, the SCSI market is in need of some serious fixes, IMO. They need to create a std that isn't so ass hard to match. The SCSI2/SCSI3, wide/narrow, LVD/single problem, 50pin/68pin, active/passive/activenegation termination, mismatch problem really needs to be solved. Sure, you can almost always get a drive working on a bus, but not always at the max possible speed. SCSI is a headache, why can't they redefine the standard of SCSI3 to be only so backwards compatible, start fairly fresh, its not like there are that many players in the market...

 

[Pariah]

You're making it sound far more complicated than it really is. Any SCSI hard drive released since mid 1998 is LVD (U2W or faster) which means it requires the exact same setup as today's drives, an LVD capable SCSI card (68pin-U2W,U160,U320), cable and LVD terminator. Any optical drive released even remotely recently (except discontinued Plextor UW) uses a 50 pin connector as has internal termination that is turned on for the last drive on the cable. It's really not that difficult. Everything else is so dated, it doesn't matter and you won't come across it in the home market.