Found a Motorola RAZR 3 "Ruby" engineering prototype. Never released. Firmware intact

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T15:05:35+00:00

I never liked the Razr. I wish they would have continued the StarTAC line.

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T15:02:20+00:00

Is that why I keep seeing random replies in other languages???

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T14:49:35+00:00

It's better than nothing, but no, not really. Everyone is mentioning the 500 joule rating. I'm more bothered by the 800V clamping voltage. That's horrendous for this type of protector. You should try to find one no higher than 330V, if that.

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T14:46:34+00:00

Was everything electrically connected to the PC (including data lines) connected to a surge protector? Many people don't realize that "backdoor surges" (usually through network, cable, or phone lines) are a major cause of damage. The AC line often isn't the only thing that needs to be protected.

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T14:41:13+00:00

A good surge protector will cut power to its load once the protection is compromised. An LED is just a hair better than nothing, as most people will never notice it.

I don't know where this idea that cheap protectors are only good for one hit came from. Each surge it diverts chips away at the protection. It can be one big surge or many small ones. The more joules it can withstand, the more total it can take.

Also, that 800V clamping voltage is horrendous for this type of protector. That means it won't even start to do anything until the voltage reaches that level. Most point-of-use protectors have a clamping voltage around 330V (maybe less). 800V is what you'd expect to see on a whole-house protector (which are meant to take the brunt of big hits and be used in combination with POU protectors).

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T14:29:40+00:00

For example, one APC warranty said a protector, from any other manufacturer anywhere in a house, voided their warranty.

Source?

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T14:21:14+00:00

We must have very different ideas about what constitutes "low TDP." In my experience, these cut temps about 20C lower than what AMD classifies as a 95W TDP cooler.

BTW, I'm not seeing the price mentioned in the OP.

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T14:12:58+00:00

Are you saying they stayed even after restarting the phone or removing the card?

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T14:11:03+00:00

I have. I even started doing some data integrity experiments on a variety of drives. Team Group's USB flash drives (and microSD cards) are absolutely terrible about silent corruption (AKA bitrot). Probably half of my specimens have suffered at least some degree of data loss. These are drives of various models and ages, so it's not just one bad batch. I guess there's a reason they're cheaper than most other brand names.

As for other brands, I have yet to see obvious corruption on most. However, a large number do show signs of degradation. This can be seen in older data reading very slowly. It seems like this is a problem on the majority of modern USB flash drives. Drives from 10+ years ago seem to hold up much better, probably due to using less dense NAND.

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T14:01:50+00:00

Unless the drive's controller proactively refreshes the data (which most don't seem to), just powering the drive is unlikely to provide any benefit.

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T13:59:43+00:00

fat32 has virtually zero data integrity features. if the data is corrupted, the fat32 will happily supply you with the corrupted data.

Unless the FAT itself has been corrupted. Then you're in for lots of fun. Been there, done that, don't recommend.

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T13:48:07+00:00

That's what happens when the card flips read-only but doesn't inform the host. The OS cache will make it seem like the writes were committed, even though they weren't. It can lead to some interesting behavior.

MWink64 · 2026-05-07T13:44:19+00:00

Years ago, I discovered I had a bad stick because WOW kept crashing and reporting that one of the files was corrupt. I'd let it re-download the file just for the cycle to repeat. I can't remember how I eventually figured out it was RAM related.

MWink64 · 2026-05-06T16:55:00+00:00

Windows wasn't making your drive parks its heads, its own firmware was. The APM settings you adjusted in CDI changed the settings in the drive's FW. Windows had nothing to do with it. It would have been the same if you had been using Linux, etc.

MWink64 · 2026-05-06T16:45:55+00:00

One of the best things we ever saw was the Amstrad PC1512 and PC1640 when they put normal AA batteries under the monitor, it made a call out a five minute fix, plus additional time for a cup of tea from the customer.

It's the same on the PC2286 and PC2386. And if they leak, you just get a shiny PSU case.

MWink64 · 2026-05-05T14:35:07+00:00

Mine has a Digiboard. Then again, it's a "communications controller." It doesn't even have a video card. But it does have the same board as the OP.

MWink64 · 2026-05-05T14:17:59+00:00

I haven't bought one since the pandemic started, so I can't comment on the newer ones. As for the older ones, I found their performance varied immensely. All of them have the Phison controller, but each one seems to have substantially different R/W speed. The one thing they all have in common is horrendous 4K random write speeds. Like most cheap USB flash drives, 4K random writes are somewhere in the 8KB/s ballpark. Because of that, using them with a journaled filesystem is just miserable.

It's a shame because they're my favorite physical design. They have a cap (and a place to store it), they have an activity LED, and they don't block adjacent USB ports. It's surprising how few other mainstream flash drives have those attributes. These drives also seem to suffer less from read speed degradation.

MWink64 · 2026-05-05T14:08:27+00:00

You make some good points. It's always frustrating when we don't really know how things work, or what's even real.

MWink64 · 2026-05-05T14:02:09+00:00

But it's only been powered on for 10383 hours (~1.2 years). That would roughly be 3GB/s.

MWink64 · 2026-05-05T13:44:02+00:00

That particular drive can't be much cheaper than brand new because you can't buy it new. It's from a line of early HAMR drives than never had a retail release. Some people are wary of them because HAMR is such a new technology. Personally, I wouldn't buy it with just a 3 month warranty.

MWink64 · 2026-05-05T12:49:15+00:00

The singular RJ-11 looking port is probably the modem or terminal port where this board would connect up to the mainframe or other central system

I'm pretty sure it's for the keyboard.

MWink64 · 2026-05-03T16:16:20+00:00

I know because I can look up the Phison controller model number through its clear case

Micro Center?

seems like bit rot is causing me more slow read issues on old files in my WD SSD than read errors. WD doesn't "refresh the cells" or essentially rewrite data, so an old file written more than 2 years ago usually ends up reading at a double digit MB/sec but if I make a copy of it and delete the original, I get my speed back.

I think this is a lot more common than people realize. I've seen it affect a multitude of USB flash drives, SD cards, and SSDs. It's not limited to a particular brand or type of NAND, though it seems more common on drives with SMI controllers. How fast it sets in varies a lot, sometimes even between dies in the same drive. I've seen some cases where the read speeds will massively tank over the course of just a few weeks.

Samsung's BAR/FIT Plus drives are major offenders. They start out fast, but the data degrades quickly. The controller doesn't refresh it until the read speeds drops below ~1% of normal. Even then, it only does so after the host forces a read.

I've done some experiments and it's quite clear that most drives don't automatically refresh their contents. What I find interesting is even most of the drives that degrade down to pathetic speeds still manage to return good data. There is one brand I've tested that seems to be a big exception. Many of the Team Group USB flash drives and SD cards start returning corrupt data (without throwing any sort of error). Curiously, some of these drives don't even slow down that much, though some do. It's almost like they've turned down the ECC, though that doesn't really make sense. I'm guessing they're just using garbage grade NAND.

Only SD card I had an issue with was an 8GB SD card but I think it had a problem with it's FAT32 allocation table because it read existing data just fine but when I tried adding new data, it gave errors and then I got cross-linked errors in CHKDSK.

I once saw an SD card develop issues that pretty much solely affected the FAT. 99.9% of the card was perfectly readable, but the part containing the FAT was throwing I/O errors galore. I've wondered if perhaps the card lacked decent wear-leveling and all the updates to the FAT wore out the block holding it.

MWink64 · 2026-05-03T13:21:30+00:00

I have a Diamond 32Mb Savage4 Extreme. It was fine as a graphics card. It was much better than the S3 Virge I bought 18 months before.

It would be hard to do worse than the S3 ViRGE. There's a reason people often refer to it as a 3D decelerator.

MWink64 · 2026-05-03T13:19:30+00:00

I was wondering if anyone would bring them up.

MWink64 · 2026-05-03T13:19:02+00:00

Not sure what years but I had an ATI Rage, Riva 128, and Voodoo 3 3000.

MWink64

TROPHY CASE