>Probably babying them too much :-\ They're in an Antec P183 case, in the bottom drive cage, nicely separated, mounted on silicone shock-absorbing grommets, with a nice steady, filtered, room-temperature breeze blowing across them. Powered by an Antec CP850 PS and an APC UPS.

We had one disk which would scale back to PIO access "because of failures" automatically about once a week.
When put into another computer with a different board, no problem at all.
No guarantee that it was a flakey bunch of disks if all were running on identical boards...


>
>From what I gather, if you want to have 2 HDs in a laptop you pretty much have to order a machine that comes from the factory with 2 HDs already installed. If you don't, they'll give you a motherboard that doesn't have headers/connectors for secondary HD power and data, and/or you'll get the non-RAID version or get a BIOS purposely crippled so it won't support more than one HD. It wouldn't cost much to include the capability, but price pressure in that market is so fierce they'll save a few bucks wherever they think they can get away with it.
>

No Problems with my Fujitsu - except for the need to buy another "bay connector" for about 20$...

>One trap the unwary can fall in is confusing partitions/volumes with actual separate physical drives. With some makers you can order a machine with, say, 1x 250GB drive, or 2x 120GB "drives". With the latter, you're still getting the same single physical 250GB hard drive, but they partition it for you into two 120GB volumes :( No RAID1 or performance benefits at all.
>

Would be sent back for wrong product description and some bad mutterings on some forums ;-)

>>You might just try with the external disk - most work places have enough boxes,
>>so I try to get by with just external disc in breast pocket ;-)
>
>Actually, these days, with a SATA 6Gbps or USB 3 port and a fast SSD in a suitable external enclosure, you could "just get by" very nicely indeed :)

Yupp, that and VM's were have taken all the nice physical exercise out of freelancing ;-)
In the Nineties I had one customer where I brought my desktop from Mondays to Thursday (with my 21' big tube - luxury item back then) every second week, because it had 5 disks and more memory than everything else in their IT. That sucker was heavy - 5.25 SCSI plus tape drive plus 1 CD-ROM and 1 CD writer, plus 2 diskette drives ... mondays and thursday "workout" was paid by the client. Those were the days...

regards

thomas