smith@aic.nrl.navy.mil (Russ Smith) (06/07/89)
[This note sent to the generic INTERNET "amiga-relay" address] Re the failure of AIR Drive replacement 3.5" disk drives... I recently replaced a flakey external on an A1000 with an AIR Drive. Since this A1000 is used as a UUCP node receiving the AMIGA mailing list, it sees a LOT of drive use (the UUCP I have doesn't allow logging to be turned off completely and the AMIGA list generates a LOT of logging PLUS messages). Anyway, the AIR Drive almost immediately showed many errors, to the point that the disk being used was rendered unreadable. This happened for multiple disks. The errors apparently cropped up during file copying/renaming that the UUCP suite does after receiving incoming messages. To more thoroughly test the drive I wrote a disk thrasher which randomly seeks/writes/reads all the free parts of the disk. This consistently caused the drive to destroy the disk under test. So, I took the drive back to the dealer and got a new one. THIS drive has worked like a charm for more than a month. The disk thrasher turned up no errors even after 3 hours of running (the disk itself was quite warm when I removed it from the drive...). UUCP has been just fine (as far as disk reading/writing, that is; the suite still has real problems with crashing the system...but that's another story...). The bottomline is that AIR Drives can be either good or bad. Buy yours from a local dealer and have him thoroughly bash it; I did with the second one and came home with a winner (a good reason to NOT buy mailorder for such things). =========================================================== ...uunet!mimsy!nrl-aic!hengeem!smith / ^^^^^^^ Russ Smith - a.k.a. | \ |--- Amiga! smith@aic.nrl.navy.mil