Arcade Collecting > Merit/JVL Touchscreen

Ion Update question

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lilshawn:
neither harddrive is as reliable as they once where. the SATA ones are failing quicker than the old ATA drives.

merit in their infinite wisdom actually flash the harddrives with custom firmware that ID it as a "merit" drive.

at the same time they F'ed up the SMART on them and the drive no longer remaps bad sectors because they also reduce the reported size of the drive the controler reports to the BIOS.  :banghead:

a brand new 120gb HD from merit gets reported as a 60 GB  drive to the BIOS.

i don't know if it's just to make it easy to clone or what, but they screwed it up. the drives get bad sectors and they can't be remapped and the drives are pooched.

since force 2005.5 and up you can use a non-merrit drive no problem anyways.

60GB SSD's go on sale all the time. throw one of them in there and reduce boot times by 1/2.

mahkeymike:
lilshawn, The reason a 120gb is being reported as a 60gb is because most likely its a refurbished drive. Basicly they took,lets say a 120gb toshiba hard drive, and took the stock controller out and replaced it with a toshiba 60gb custom flashed controller. The custom flash can only read the 60gb on the drive. They did this i believe to save money and get rid of old stock. It cost money to have these things custom flashed. Also, companys like toshiba are not going to custom flash the hard drives unless you are buying thousands of them. I doubt they were even selling that many megatouch systems toward the end. Hense why they opted to buy stock 120gb or larger drives and swap out the controllers from smaller custom "merit" controllers.

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