Re: Plextor acting up!

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember Jaimie Vandenbergh
<jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> saying something like:

but the Liteon drive was a featherweight piece
of nastiness built down to a price.

Why do you associate weight with quality?

Past associations - ok, it's not necessarily true with modern
componentry, for the reasons you mention below. In the case of the
LiteOn PVR drive it was just ... cheap and nasty, where too much had
been pared off the spec and left it unable to do the job.

It seems to be a human nature thing. Which is why older IBM keyboards
have 2mm thick steel baseplates - reassuringly sturdy. Does it make
them last longer? No, because the keyswitches are the important items
on a keyboard.

Funny you should mention that...
Fifteen years I've had this IBM keyboard and expect it will last another
fifteen. It was out of a typesetting house and eight years old when I
got it, so had lots of use. Solid as an old nail and twice as noisy, but
I wouldn't use a modern crap keyboard if you gave me one for nothing.
Indeed, I've got several k/bds that languish in their boxes.

Quality, not ***.

Similarly, the two motors and the balancing kit in a CD drive are the
only items likely to be at all heavy, and current magnet technology
allows new drives to have smaller, cheaper, more powerful magnets that
do all the necessary electromagnetic things but are much lighter than
the big clunky ones that used to be used.

That's all very true - but in reducing component count the necessary
cost-cutting often includes a reduction in remaining component quality,
thus adding to the impression of lightness = crapness.
.

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