harry@eedsp.gatech.edu (Harry Wutzen Li) (09/24/89)
Here's the latest info. I could gather about the bad quantum hard drives. 1. Apple and Quantum reached an agreement and will make a formal announcement in the next couple of weeks. I got this from a regional sales director at Quantum. She insinuated that Apple was going to come through on replacing the bad, out of warranty drives as was indicated in the latest issue of MacWeek. I also had my 40 Meg replaced at no cost about a week and a half ago even though my 90 day warranty expired about 90 days ago. 2. She said that even though the Quantum drives were warrantied for 2 years, that because Apple sold the drive in their machine that they had every right to put a 90-day warranty on it and that there was nothing anybody could do about it. She also said that Quantum would not be able to deal directly with anyone regarding this issue and that we would have to go to our nearest and dearest local Apple dealer. 3. The customer service woman that I talked to at Apple told me that if I sent her a copy of my service request form, that she would give me 6 months of free Apple Care. She even said that if the machine was still under warranty, that we would still receive the free Apple Care, so save all your paper work. 4. The new 40 Meg drive I got replaced in my IIcx was also a Quantum. I have my doubts about this drive too. It clicks real loud when I first boot up and it was already formatted. The local Apple dealer said that there is a possibility that the "new" drive is re-conditioned and that there was no way for them to tell if it was new.. 5. In the latest count, I've received information regarding 8-80Meg drives which have bit the big one, and 9-40Meg drives (including my own) which have also died. In case you missed my first posting about a week ago. I'm still tallying up the number of people who have had hard disk problems in their IIcx's so send me your hard disk/luck stories. harry@eedsp.gatech.edu Analog Microelectronic Research Group Georgia Tech
ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) (09/28/89)
What do you mean by "the drive was already formatted"? If you mean that it already had a Macintosh file system on it, then it may be a used drive, but if you just mean that you could read and write arbitrary blocks without getting errors from the drive, that means nothing. Quantum drives are always formatted. In fact, if you issue a SCSI format command to these drives, it comes back in about five seconds, because all the drive seems to do is re-write the bad block tables and other housekeeping information. ( There is an option one can set in one of the mode select pages that causes it to write a data pattern to every block during a format ). Tim Smith