dbercel@toto.UUCP (06/05/87)
Here is the summary of all responses I received to my posting about 20MB and 30MB disks. The general concensus was that the Seagate ST238 was *NOT* a stable disk drive but that the ST225 was fine. There were, however, a few people who reported no problems with the ST238. danielle ---------------------------------------------------------- From seismo!umix!itivax!chinet!karld Sun May 31 13:49:05 1987 Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix The RLL/ST238 combination is one we cannot recommend here at the present time. Out technician is looking into the exact cause of the problems, but it seems at this point to be just a lack of retentivity in the media. ST225's (20M) work just fine, at least for us. Beware of them right now, unless you have a good supplier, though -- there is a bad bunch of them around at present that have serious problems, and will probably fail right after about 90 days. Make sure you get a 1 year warranty with instant replacement. There are other alternatives, we have used a 40M AT drive in an XT with a WD controller, you need what is called the "Autoconfig ROM" to do this, as well as some patience. This might be the right way to go for you, it is fast AND big.. Anything I can do to help, let me know. We carry drives here, and can supply you if you need it. ---------------------------------------------------------- >From amdcad!ames!rutgers!uwvax!rhesus!uwmacc!anderson Mon Jun 1 09:15:05 PDT 1987 Organization: UWisconsin-Madison Academic Comp Center I bought an ST238 with an Adaptec 2070a controller last November for $454 with cables and power-cable splitter (from Cal-Abco) and put it in my Z-158. Installation, both mechanical and electrical, was a snap (would be for any handy-type person, I think), and the board takes care of soft formatting, making the software installation also very easy. I formatted it as one MS-DOS partition. Almost immediately I had done this, I began seeing problem reports on the net from people who had this combination, so I was very nervous for a while. However, if I understand things right, there was a troublesome spring that retracts the heads at power-down (I think Seagate later fixed that) such that at a later power-up, the heads were not quite where they should be. The remedy was to soft-format the disk again. Some people had to to this more than once. Whether by dumb good fortune or the fact that I turn the machine off only when thunderstorms are rolling through (a lot lately), I have yet to have *any* problem in six months plus a week, so I am quite pleased (but knock wood in any case). ---------------------------------------------------------------- From pyramid!pyramid.UUCP!mikel Mon Jun 1 12:23:30 1987 I have had a Seagate ST225 (same as the ST238 but not RLL) for a year now with no problems. I just added another so I can play with MINIX and have had a few minor problems with setup but nothing important (poor documentation and some missing parts, I got a poor salesperson). I have heard that there was a bad batch of these drives but I have not run into anyone who has one. ------------------------------------------------------- From oliveb!olivej!dragon Mon Jun 1 15:19:10 1987 If you're really interested in aquiring a hard disk, at home I use a Seagate 40 mb ST251 (40ms access time). It cost about $550, but that was without a controller (I used the one that was already in my AT clone). If you want to go 30mb, Seagate has one available that isn't RLL format. The RLL format is what seems to give everyone the trouble with the ST238, so if you stay away from that there should be no trouble. Unfortunately the 30mb is for an AT, so it's fast, full height, and expensive. ------------------------------------------------------ From seismo!rochester!steinmetz!davidsen Mon Jun 1 16:14:26 1987 Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY The 238 seems to be an ST225 which is RLL capable. It's slow and clunky. A better bet (if you can afford about $600) is the ST2051 (I think that's the model) which is 40MB formatted, 6 heads, 28ms, half height. You can use the capacity in one of three ways; in two partitions as two drives, each <= 32MB, as one big non-standard drive, using software such as Speedstor, or as two drives using DOS3.3. ------------------------------------------------------ From amdahl!drivax!tyler Mon Jun 1 18:15:44 1987 Organization: Digital Research, Monterey Get either a 20MB or 40MB. I'm personally aware of 4 30MB installations (one of them on my own PC). EVERY ONE OF THEM started to go flaky after a month or so. These were all ST238 + Adaptec RLL controller. I was able to exchange my 30MB for a 40MB under warranty, and I'm very happy with the new setup. (The exchange was even only because I'd paid an exorbitant amount for the 30MB system, just before prices dropped to their present levels.) Anyhow, stay away from 30MB. One solution you might consider is to add a second drive to supplement your 10MB drive. If you add a 20MB drive, you'll have a total of 30MB, better reliability, and you won't have to sacrifice your 10MB drive (almost worthless, used). ---------------------------------------------------- From seismo!moss!houxl!jja1 Mon Jun 1 23:46:16 1987 I've been using a Seagate ST 238 with a WD RLL controller for about 6 weeks now. The PC I'm using is a good clone (ACS 1000 motherboard) running at 8 Meg. I did the low level format, fdisk, and regular format, and the drive seemed to work fine. Then, after a few days, I started to get various read errors. To make a long story short, I reformatted several times, using different interleave factors (4 is recommended). The thing would work fine for a few days, then the same errors. Never any problem writing new files, but accessing existing ones caused problems every now and then. The problem would get worse as time passed. I was just about to return the drive, when I remembered that friends with cheaper Taiwan clones were experiencing problems with floppies while running at Turbo speed. They would have to slow their machines down while formatting floppies, some to do any disk I/O. So, my last attempt was to slow the machine down to 4.77 MHz, and do the entire operation again; low level format, fdisk, and regular format. Since then (a little over a month), I've had no problems whatsoever. I can boot at either speed and have not had a read error since formatting at the slower speed. It seems that with clones, there's a lot of compatibility problems with cheaper motherboards and/or floppy controllers. I had not experienced problems with floppies as the controller is built into the motherboard. But, apparently, the drive/controller setup did not like being formatted at 8 MHz. I'm not a PC expert, but have had a fair amount of experience with clones. I don't know if I'd recommend the ST 238, but I wouldn't condemn it either. Friends of mine swear up and down that the RLL technology is not perfected yet. They're not experts by any means, just skeptics (some jealous of my 30 Meg XT-clone). Here's an excerpt of an article I pulled off the net a few weeks ago. It gives a little insight of the differences between the ST 225 and the ST 238: >Right you are. It is best not to use the Seagate ST-225 with an >RLL controller card (insert your favorite brand). The ST-225 >doesn't promise to have plated media, plated being better for the >higher bit density of RLL than standard oxide media. A brochure >from Seagate also claims that the electronics of the ST-238 have >also been "optimized" for RLL 2/7.-- although that probably isn't >anything more than a trim pot set to a slightly different value. >Rumor has it that ST-225s currently appearing on the market really >are 238s, but just have not undergone the level of testing >necessary to certify as a 238. What can I say, you pays your money >and takes your chance if you use a 225 with RLL. A 238 is only >about 50 bucks more than a 225, so I opted for the 238 on my own >computer. I hope my experiences have given you a little insight to the 30 Meg question. --------------------------------------------------------------- From seismo!rochester!ritcv!cci632!ccird2!cjb Tue Jun 2 11:31:43 1987 Organization: 555-1212: Our Box talks to you Why not go big, real big. I had a Xebeque (sp?) controller with a 10meg. I replaced just the drive with a CDC Wren 2 (st-506 interface). I found that DOS had a 30Meg limit. Never fear, I bought Vfeature software program which lets you use any size drive (up to 300+Meg). Low and behold I found a whole 86Meg unformatted. I would up partition the drive into many volumes ( 20,20,15,15,6 ). Well I did manage to pretty much use 30 Meg so far, and I still have a lot of floppies not on the drive! Last I saw these drives were in the $600-700 price range. I also think that you might find them cheaper. If a 40Meg costs about $400 then bit for buck you have saved money. But aside from storage, the reason I bought one was that I do a lot of C compiles on large files. This drive improved my compile time by a factor of three. My Eagle turbo is 3 times faster than out ITT and IBM machine then add this drive it becomes about 6times faster. When a 20 minute compile (ohh those libraries) takes under 5 minutes... Try to find a fast drive with the size you need. If you get one this big then you can set separate interleave and block size specs. This is useful when you know what kind of work your doing. Word processing on small to medium documents is much different to keep (efficiency wise) then 3000 line source listings. ------------------------------------------------------------ From velte@brillig.umd.edu Thu Jun 4 09:32:28 1987 Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742 i have had a seagate 238 and adaptek rll for about a year now and i have had absolutely no problems. my machine is a zenith pc, with a faster crystal, running about 7.34 mhz. i never turn the machine off though, and maybe that is why i don't have any problems. -- UUCP: {hplabs,decvax,}!sun!toto!{danielle,dbercel} COM: dbercel%toto@sun.com ARPA: dbercel@sun.arpa /-------------------------------------\ | Toto, I don't think this is Kansas. | -- Danielle Bercel \-------------------------------------/ Sun Microsystems, Inc.