svermeulen@Janus.MRC.AdhocNet.CA (Steve Vermeulen) (02/09/89)
Hi All, I posted a message or two in December/early January about the Conner Peripherials CP3100 hard disk I had. This is a 3.5 inch 104 Meg drive (formatted!) with a SCSI interface. I had a number of EMail inquiries about this drive in the past month or so and I thought I'd post a status report on it. The first drive I had died one night (within the first 30days of ownership) when I powered down the system to remove on of my external floppy drives. When I powered the system back up (this was after several minutes of down time since it is trick getting to the back of my 2000) the Amiga would not boot. Further investigation revealed that the system was crashing during the BindDrivers command. (I am running the Conner and a ST-251 off a 2090 card). Testing with a second 2090 card and a CLtd SCSI card revealed that the problem was not the SCSI half of the 2090 card (once the Conner was disconnected the ST-251 was functional again). The CLtd card somes with some additional SCSI diagnostic software which I was able to use to determine that the Conner was responding to the SCSI buss but when it tried to access the disk a problem occurred. I contacted Hamilton-Avnet (the distributer) about this and they immediatly ordered a replacement drive (on the 30-day infant mortality clause). It took about 3 weeks (2 weeks actually, the big blizzard added another week) to get the replacement drive. Since I now had both drives to look at I connected the controller card of the bad drive to the new hard disk and was able to verify that the problem was not the controller card, but must have been the mechanical part of the drive. The problem with these conners is that they are SO QUIET! Even with your ear to the drive (and the case of the 2000 off) you cannot detect normal rotation. Active seeking (long directories) can be heard but only with difficulty over the 2000's fan noise. So I was never certain whether the drive was actually spinning. Stephen Vermeulen Author: Express Paint Newsletter Editor of AMUC SVermeulen%Janus.MRC.AdhocNet.CA@UncaNet.BITnet