garey@ut-ngp.UUCP (riggs, austen) (03/29/85)
David Lees was asking about cheap 20 meg hard disks, in particular from PC's Limited here in Austin Texas. I bought one two days ago. The current price is $775 although the april byte magazine has them listed at $695 (I called them about that and they said thats wrong. I think its their April price.). The Drive is a microscience half height. The listing on the outside said it had two bad sectors and listed where they were. The controller is a Western Digital WX2. They pre format the drives in the shop before they send them out to make sure they work properly and it worked first time everytime..... so far. The documentatioon is minimal, about 5 pages of poor xerox copy. There is a floppy that comes with it and I guess it has utilites for messing with the drive. If there is no floppy in the machine it automatically boots on the C: drive with 21.4 megabytes free. I hope this helps. I'm not connected in any way with the above mentioned company. In fact I'm a little mad at them. They only provided 2 mounting screws instead of the 4 required. By the way the drive is in my friends Zenith Z150 because I haven't got mine yet. Jim GArey garey@ut-ngp.arpa
garey@ut-ngp.UUCP (riggs, austen) (03/30/85)
lsmith@ut-ngp was asking about the noise made by cheap hard disks. I don't think it has much to do with the price. If you spin something round and round at 3600 rpm its going to whine some. I also find it irritating. My cheapy drive seems to make about the same if not less noise than my friends $4000 20 meg system from Micro-Designs (which has the exact same controller and hard disk as my $775 system but with the addition of a 5 meg removable Syquest drive). The PC/XT's around seem to be about the same in noise level. The Kaypro 10 however, is the quietest hard disk system I've been around. I don't know who makes their drive, but maybe its the brand, rather than the price. Ever been in a computer room where Vaxen or other mini/mainframe hard disks are running? The operators often wear earplugs. Jim Garey garey@ut-ngp.arpa
vch@rruxo.UUCP (V. Hatem) (04/03/85)
After hearing that PC/XT hard drives whine, I have to say that my two 10-meg drives are quiter than the fan in the power supply. In fact, they only make a barley audible "sh-sh-sh" when they read or write. If yours makes more noise than that, you might want to bring it in to be fixed. Vince Hatem Bell Communications Research --- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | The assumption that a whole system can be made to work better through an | | assault on its conscious elements betrays a dangerous ignorance. This | | has often been the ignorant approach of those who call themselves | | scientists and technologists. | | -The Butlerian Jihad | | by Harq al-Ada | | (Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert, p395) | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
gsk@lzwi.UUCP (G.S.KONG) (08/29/85)
Abstract.
previous articles have discussed the installation of
cheap hard disks on IBM PCs.
this article contains a report of another successful installation
(in an AT&T PC 6300) and a question.
The Report.
i bought a Shugart SA604 5 meg ST506-interface drive
from Priority One Electronics for $99.00.
for various reasons (see below), i decided to use the DTC 5150BX
disk controller board, which cost $199.00 from Creative Microsales.
the DTC controller includes formatting routines in ROM,
but the ROM contains a table of common drive types
which doesn't include the SA604.
however, i was able to burn a new PROM easily
after talking to an engineer at DTC for few minutes.
the only other items i needed were a power supply, power cables,
and an enclosure for the drive and power supply.
The Question.
i asked various people about hard disk controller cards,
and almost everybody claimed that the DTC controller was
better than other controllers,
but nobody could tell me exactly why.
in general, people seem to think it's faster and more reliable.
you must have a PROM burner that produces checksums
(I used a Data I/O burner).
does anybody on the net have any wisdom to offer here?
in your experience, how do different manufacturers'
hard disk controller boards compare, and what makes some
better than others?
Further Details.
you can find out how to reach Priority One and Creative Microsales
by consulting their ads in Byte and PC World, respectively.
you can find out how to modify the PROM (a 2764) by calling
Mike Arellano at DTC (Data Technology Corporation) in San Jose, Ca.
George Kong
AT&T Information Systems
LZ1B-115H (201)576-7912
{ihnp4|btlunix|vax135}!lznv!gskgsk@lzwi.UUCP (G.S.KONG) (08/29/85)
if my previous article seems incoherent, it may be because i scrambled the text a little. the sentence beginning "you must have a PROM burner..." belongs at the very end of the article, not where it appears. G. Kong