micron@ames.UUCP (Ron Miller) (03/23/85)
I've been seeing a tremendous amount of discussion over the past few
months concerning the AT's hard disc failures. I am assuming that the
drives in question have all been the Computer Memories Inc. product.
We have three AT's that were "enhanced" either on-site or by a local
non-chain dealer. Initially, all had CMI drives and performed well.
The bad byte (which really translates to bad clusters) counts were all
very high (20 to 40 ) per drive. The disk check feature on Norton
confirmed these counts by the way. Our dealer called one day and said
that he was a bit paranoid about the CMI drives and would, if we wished,
swap them for Microscience 20 Meg. half heights at no charge. Now I
don't generally believe in fixing things that aren't broken but I went
for this one immediatly. The Microscience disk is less expensive than
the CMI and I expect he made a buck on the deal returning the CMI drives
to the vendor but I don't really care. The Microscience drives are a
good deal noisier than the CMI's, but between the 3 drives two had NO
media defects whatsoever and one had five bad bytes. They install a
little strangely, but seem to be working just fine.
I guess the whole point of this is to ask that when reporting AT hard
disk failures, PLEASE include the manufacturer of the drive. The problem
has variously been reported as a DOS problem, a controller problem and
a drive problem. If the only drives that die are CMIs that would seem
to narrow it down.
Thanks,
Ron Miller
NASA-Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, Ca.
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