dawyd@gargoyle.uchicago.edu (David Walton) (10/09/89)
The University where I work has recently started to sell hard drives
from a company called Dolphin. I've had some rather irritating experiences
with these products which I thought mac.netters might want to know about.
Paranoid disclaimer: all of the opinions in this post are my own, and
aren't intended to represent the University of Chicago, University Computing
Organizations, its staff, or anyone except myself (whew!).
1. Bad programming: Dolphin utilities
Sincere, earnest warning: DO NOT USE DOLPHIN UTILITIES WITH ANY OTHER
BRAND OF HARD DRIVE. While looking at Dolphin's format/installation
utilities, I managed to completely nuke my SE's internal Apple Hard
drive. Dolphin utilities post an initial alert which says, "This
program designed to be run only on dolphin hardware" (oh how true),
but provide little subsequent protection from damaging actions. In
particular, I clicked on "update [scsi] driver", got no alert to
confirm my actions, and corrupted the driver on the disk so badly that
my SE would not even boot unless the hard drive was disconnected. We
had to transplant the disk from my SE to an external casing just to
reformat it.
Yes, you say, but the program did warn you, no? Well, yes. But not
very well. It certainly gave me no idea that if I accidentally
clicked a button I would wipe out my hard drive for a week. In those
cases where a user has more than one drive on the SCSI bus, this can
happen quite easily, in fact: one selects the drive from a list of IDs
on the device chain which are active-- the utility tells you nothing
more than the size of the media on the device. If a novice user
selects the wrong ID and hits the wrong button, bingo--dead drive. I
object to this setup especially because it takes so little time to put
some protection (like alerts which ask for confirmation) into the
program. In particular, the program does a poor job of warning you
against the consequences of specific actions (something
like"Continuing will cause loss of data, starvation in much of Europe
and General Consternation on the part of your employer. Continue?"
might be in order). "This program might be dangerous for your disk
but we won't tell you how or why" doesn't cut it with me. (The tech
rep DID say that he'd rewrite the code to put up some alerts to
confirm actions, and that the code would be in the version that
shipped after this weekend.)
In short, any programmer who had read the Macintosh interface
guidelines would know better than this.
2. Quality control
Somebody in my department recently set up a Dolphin integra drive.
According to him, various things were wrong: the casing looked
scratched and generally beat up, the drive was badly packaged, etc.
Finally, the SCSI cable inside the drive unit was not properly
connected. Dolphin claims, of course, that all of their drives are
factory-tested; one wonders if they actually test the drive once it's
in the casing. I have my doubts.
3. General sloppiness
I have seen two cases where people received the wrong documentation
for their drives (hard drive doc for a removable cartridge drive). I
have also seen all of their documentation refer to a "SCSI ID manual"
which was not shipped with any of the units. Nor was I impressed with
the documentation that was provided.
4. Customer/technical support
This review is more mixed than those above. Technical support was
always helpful when I called, and they were very good about calling
back. On the other hand, it took one and a half weeks of
conversations before we finally communicated about why a removable
cartridge drive wouldn't show up on teh desktop on first boot. It was
a pretty minor thing that I probably wouldn't have thought of, but the
rep said he'd seen this symptom several times, and the fix in my case
was simply a matter of going through the steps of inserting a
cartridge. Something I suspect he could have told me, since he knew
that I didn't have the documentation (because they hadn't sent it in
the first place).
Also...I'm still not satisfied with the tech's claim of why updating
the driver on my disk prevented the Macintosh from booting (it's a long
story, but his explanation directly contradicted the tech note on how
SCSI hard drives boot).
5. But...
On the other hand, the Flipper (removable media) drive worked fine
once I waded through various amounts of mis- or un-information about
how to set it it up. It was fast, responded well, etc., etc. I guess
my feeling about Dolphin is that they probably have good products, but
they have a shitty quality control department and they need alot more
experience with the Macintosh user interface when writing their
utilities.
SUMMARY: if you're planning to buy a dolphin drive, wait. These folks
really seem to have good products, but they need to package and
document them much better than they do.
Please post about other opinions about/experiences with this company.
--
David Walton Internet: dwal@tank.UChicago.EDU
University of Chicago { Any opinions herein are my own, not }
Computing Organizations { those of my employers (or anybody else). }