rmmiller@bu-cs.UUCP (02/12/87)
I thought I would relay the following experience to provide a general warning and to see if this has happened to anyone else. Seven months ago I purchased an 8Mhz PC's Limited AT with what appeared to be a 40 MB Seagate hard disk already installed in it. The only ID I could see from the top of it was a sticker that said "Type 11." This type number tells the configuration program that the drive is a 40MB drive. Using a driver provided by PC's Limited I had partitioned it into a 32MB "drive" and an 8MB "drive". I rarely used the second drive. No problems at all until... Ten days ago the hard disk suffered what appeared to be a head crash. I noticed as I removed it that it was a Seagate Model 4038 drive. Today I got the replacement drive and noticed that it was a Model 4051. Otherwise, it looked identical to the original drive. I wondered it this was a new, improved drive and was surprised to learn that the original drive was only a 30MB drive that someone, somewhere had placed a Type 11 sticker on top of. When I looked at the data sheet kindly provided along with the original drive, but, suspiciously, not with the replacement, it said that the drive was a 4038 and indeed, it had only 733 cylinders, which did not register to me at the time as being only 30MB because I was not used to think in cylinders. In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to this when I got the drive. The point of this is that it does appear that either intentionally or by accident a 30MB can be passed off as a 40MB drive and work fine, at least for a while. You would think that they would have said something upon receiving back a 30MB drive instead of the 40MB drive that the return authorization called for. Either they would have called to acknowledge the error or they would have thought that I was ripping them off by sending back a different drive than I had purchased. I called the tech support line back, which was a toll-free call and was answered quickly and courteous. I, however, was not particularly happy about all this. I told my story to the person who answered the phone and as soon I finished he said I should speak to his supervisor. The supervisor said that he could not get the records to confirm my story, but was sorry if I really did get the wrong hard disk, that it was just a mistake, and that he never heard of this happening before. He was not able to tell me why someone did not notify me of the mistake before I caught it. It is as a community-minded consumer that I am posting this experience (and probably also because I am ticked off). I have no way of knowing how many drives like this are out there or how I happened to get one. From my previous direct experience, PC's Limited has done really well for a mail order place and they did get a replacement drive right out to me. Ross M. Miller rmmiller@bucs.bu.edu and ...!harvard!bu-cs!rmmiller