keithe@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson) (02/28/89)
In article <279@tscs.UUCP> gerard@tscs.UUCP (Stephen M. Gerard) writes: >I will offer one other opinion, Seagate half >height drives are not the worst we have seen, Miniscribe gets the >award on pure garbage in the half height department. I would never >trust my data to a drive that makes strange tinny sounding whirring >and clunking noises. > Stephen's comment prompts me to recall that I owe the Net a continuation of my "us versus Miniscribe" story. You may recall (or may not - how long have you been reading net news?) that our story began with the purchase of nine (nine) Miniscribe 3053 half-height 40 megabyte disk drives for use with our brand-spanking news Ibtel 301 386AT computers. This was back before Seagate had the -1 version of the 255. Chapter Two detailed the increasing failure rates of the drives, usually failing their own power-up self-test, sometimes just plain not working. A couple were repaired (replaced, actually) under warranty, one or two were repaired for $$ ($75, as I recall). Finally I'd just plain HAD it with these stupid little things dying (dieing?) like flies and decided it was Miniscribe's place to foot the repair bill. I talked to a couple of people at Miniscribe, described the problem and (get this:) got a POSITIVE response form them. Something like "Sounds like you got some early production units - let's just replace them for you"! (my exclamation pont, not theirs). So chapter three finds your happy computer camper once again in possession of drives that work and work pretty well. But then comes Chapter Four where we try to use the most recently received drives as RLL drives which we've done with several of the other (replaced) drives. (No, they're not spec'd for it, but all the others have worked just fine so far...). Of the four received, two continue the tradition of essentially NO failed tracks/sectors; each of the other two end up with over a megabyte of bad sectors. (This with the Adaptec 2372B controller). So it'a a mixed (up?) review. The drives have been replaced and perform as advertised. But they don't work "beyond the spec" as well as they had before. (Is this one of the hardware analogies of using undocumented DOS calls?) Can't really complain; after all I was trying to get something for nothing. (And when you come down to it, I still can: the 40 megabyte 3053 becomes ~60 megabytes; losing 1 megabyte in bad sectors still nets ~59 megabytes. Shouldn't really complain, I 'spose). Based on the responsiveness of the people at Miniscribe (once I got to the right person) I wouldn't hesitate to purchase more Miniscribe drives. (Maybe the name "Tektronix" had a little bit to do with it - but I didn't really get that impression) kEITH +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Keith Ericson at TekLabs (resident factious factotum) | |Tektronix, PO 500, MS 58-383 Beaverton OR 97077 (503)627-6042 | +---------------------------------------------------+-------------------------+ | UUCP: uunet!tektronix!tekgvs!keithe or | Note: These addresses | | uunet!tektronix!tekgvs.labs.tek.com!keithe | may be hazardous | | ARPA: keithe%tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM@RELAY.CS.NET | to your mailer's | | CSNet: keithe@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM | health!! | +---------------------------------------------------+-------------------------+ | Mail sent via "machine1!machine2!...!keithe@machineN.UUCP" doesn't make it! | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | "Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, | | and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you." - R.P. Feynman | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+