On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, Chris Manning wrote:

> > The removable disc hard drives are generally intended for primary storage
> > use, not just for backups so you shouldn't have any problems.
> 
> The usual warranty these days seems to be three years for large IDE drives,
> five years for SCSI.  The lack of any mention of a warranty in the
> advertisements that I've seen for the Jaz suggests that it's only a year.

ISTR that they're three years on the drive and one on the disks. The 
SyQuests being similar if not identical.

The Fujistu MagOpt however, are designed for backup use as well as online
storage. The fact that they use a two pass write means that they are
slower (although the new 640MB one is not too bad). But with a 25-50 year
guarantee on the disks and the ability to bung them in a washing machine
without fear of damage (as long as you dry them out before using them
again :-) they are rather more reliable than any magnetic only effort. 
The disks are actually quite cheap as well. 

> > The new Syquest 1.3GB SyJet drives are also worth a look.
> 
> Do they actually exist?  Even Watford Electronics seem to have removed them
> from their price lists.   ;-)

According to SyQuest they should ship this Autumn (but I believe SyQuest 
originally said they would be out around six months back). So they will 
probably be available in the UK sometime after Christmas at the earliest!


To get back on topic for the mailing list...

Is there any reason why RiscBSD might not work with any of these sort of
drives? I presume that, being SCSI, RiscBSD could not care less what type
of drive it is, but... 

Also, a daft question. If RiscBSD is running from a removable disk and the
disk is accidentally ejected, is there any chance that the system would
not die horribly?

What does BSD do when a mounted device ceases to exist?  Will it wait for
the device to return or simply shut itself down as best it can? 


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