[znpy]

> today we seem too willing to put up with being sold broken stuff.

i remember reading that when hard disks just came into the mass market they were so expensive that having some bad sectors was not such a big deal... and so hard disk would usually come with a sheet of paper listing the known broken sectors (detected at QA stage, i guess).

maybe someone older than me (i guess somebody in their 50ies or 60ies) could confirm that.

[bitwize]

I'm not that old, but I remember seeing bad sector lists as stickers on some hard disks.

I'm not sure if that ever went away, though... I think the IDE firmware in more modern hard disks knew how to redirect bad sectors to good sectors, so the end user never even noticed.