871323o@aucs.uucp (Oliver Oey) (08/09/89)
I'm trying to decide on which hard drive that I should put my money on. After checking out the news on the net here and messages on CompuServe. Almost all brand names of hard drives on the market received praise or abuse of some sort. There are two names which I haven't seen mentioned, Miniscribe and Seagate. Therefore I am assuming no body had any major problems with the above two brands. Since Apple use Seagate, I think I'll go for the drives with Seagate mechanism. If anyone has any bad experience with Seagate drives, please let me know. I'll make up my mind at the end of the week and hopefully place an order on Monday. Thanks in advance.
kingman@tci.UUCP (Matt) (08/10/89)
871323o@aucs.uucp (Oliver Oey) writes: >...There are two names which I >haven't seen mentioned, Miniscribe and Seagate. Therefore I am assuming >no body had any major problems with the above two brands. Since Apple >use Seagate, I think I'll go for the drives with Seagate mechanism. > >If anyone has any bad experience with Seagate drives, please let me >know. I'll make up my mind at the end of the week and hopefully place >an order on Monday. > >Thanks in advance. I have a Seagate 40Mb drive in my Mac II and it often refuses to boot, and occasionally refuses to even spin up (I initially thought the cable was loose, but unfortunately, not the problem). I haven't used any other Seagate SCSI drives, but I have also had problems with several IBM-PC type Seagate drives, both full and half height. The other problem is that some of the Seagate models tend to be noisy. On a positive note, they are usually less expensive than other brands. I haven't had any bad experiences with Miniscribe drives. Just for info, my 40 will soon be replaced by a Quantum ProDrive. I've found that they are fast, reliable, and quiet. (even if they are more expensive than other brands) Good Luck /Matt ...I have no affiliation with any of the aforementioned products or companies. Just speaking from personal experience.....
joeb@hpmwtd.HP.COM (Joe Ballantyne) (08/10/89)
I bought two Seagate ST-277N drives. They are 65Mbyte drives. They have both flaked out on me - one regularly and the other one only occasionally. Don't buy Seagate drives. They are slow - compared to Quantum drives, and they are cheap. And yes, you do get what you pay for. Not much. One of the drives when used with System 6.0 or earlier would crash the system if it was left idling for more than 2 minutes before data was read or written to the drive. I believe that it was returning a SCSI status code of check condition due to a seek error. Naturally the system software was incapable of dealing intelligently with this disk malfunction and crashed. System 6.02 got rid of this problem. However, Seagate claims the seek error rate of their drive to be 1 in 1 million seeks. Not in the case of this drive. If the seeks were seperated by 2 minutes in time, the error rate was more like 1 in 1. Since Apple was using Seagate drives, they may have been seeing this problem also. That is probably why they rewrote the software to retry the seek without crashing the machine - it makes the disk look like it is ok, when it is really not performing up to par. If I were buying disk drives now, I would undoubtedly get a Quantum Pro Drive. They are FAST, and with the exception of some which seem to have spin up problems, they are reliable. Joseph Ballantyne joeb@hpmwtd.HP.COM - The experiences and opinions expressed above are mine - they have nothing whatsoever to do with HP. Since HP has nothing whatsoever to do with the Mac and related hardware. (At least at my division.)
pratt@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Jonathan Pratt) (08/10/89)
I have a 65Mbyte ST-277N drive in the guise of an Apple Crate. Except
at boot time it's been reliable for the 1.5 years I've had it. It
suffers from the common won't-spin-up-when-cold syndrome. But then, so
does the 40Mb Quantum drive in the Mac II I use. Whoever boxed it
offered a nice long two year warranty, so one of these days I may
complain. If I were doing it over I would still get the Seagate drive,
but I would have waited a couple months for the parts to become
available so I could box it myself and save a couple hundred $.
Jonathan
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