Michael_J_Dedina@cup.portal.com (06/25/88)
Does anyone have any experience with the Atasi 4036 hard drive. I noticed a good price on these drives in Computer Shopper (used), but I don't know anything about them. Anyone had any problems with them? Or even heard of them? Please respond to me personally. Thanks. --------------------- Mike Dedina dedina@gold.bacs.indiana.edu dedina@iubacs.bitnet Michael_J_Dedina@cup.portal.com
caf@omen.UUCP (Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX) (06/27/88)
According to the person who sold me a 3046 drive (is that the one you have?), there was a design problem in the original design. Refurbished drives with a redesigned part are supposed to be reliable. I've been using one for the news file system on Xenix and later ISC Unix without any apparent problems. Be aware that most ROM BIOS drive tables will only allow one to use the first 30 megabytes of the drive. Anyway, they can't be any worse than the $1750 20 MB (now 0) rip-off that came with my IBM PC-AT. (You know, the one that defines "IBM PC Product Support".)
tucker@urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM (06/27/88)
The Atasi hard drives you mention were used by Convergent Technologies in their Miniframe and Megaframe computers. They are small by todays standards (35M), but have a good seek time (<40ms). We have a few of them here, and they have been connected to diskless SUN workstations. We've had no problems, but one of the four drives we recovered (from a dead Megaframe) had many "many" bad sectors. It was unusable. I think the drive is ok, but I don't know why they are being dumped on the market. I saw them being sold for $50 each at a ham fest two months ago. I must have seen thousands of them. I've also see mail order places trying to get upto $300 for these drives. I don't think I would pay that much for an old drive. Tim Tucker ..ihnp4!uiucdcs!urbsdc!tucker (UUCP) tucker@xenurus.Gould.COM (Milnet)
john@wa3wbu.UUCP (John Gayman) (06/30/88)
In article <27000027@urbsdc>, tucker@urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM writes: > > The Atasi hard drives you mention were used by Convergent Technologies > in their Miniframe and Megaframe computers. They are small by todays This is true. We had six Megaframes with Atasi's and over a period of a year and a half, all of the drives went bad. Most had their spindle motors go out, the others just had mega-read/write errors and had to be changed. I have seen these for $300-$350 in the magazines and I would not recommend buying one based on the experiences we had. By the way, all the drives were eventually swapped out with Hitachi DK-51 drives which are performing flawlessly. John -- John