steph@maui.cs.ucla.edu (07/14/89)
The recent posting by Chuq has prompted me into reporting about by experiences with some drive repairs. First some background. Except in a few cases most companies do not manufacture their own drives. They buy them from other companies and put them in a case with a power supply and sell them. I have a friend who had his SuperMac XP60 die. We determined that the drive assembly was bad. Supermac uses a separate controller and drive for the 30 and 60 since they are using an RLL controler. Well Supermac charges their dealers $460 to repair the XP60. The dealer may then add something to cover his costs. The drive manufacturer was Microscience and I gave them a call and found that they would REPLACE the drive with a refurbished unit for $280. He saved $180++. I had a couple of CMS boxes go out. One was easy, the drive was okay, the power supply had died. I was ready to send it back when somebody posted a message about bad capacitors in CMS drives. Well, I checked and that was the problem. The repair would have cost $80, the capacitor was $1.00. The other CMS was definitely the disk drive. CMS wanted $350, the manufacturer, Quantum wanted a MAXIMUM of $250. Depending on what they replaced it might be less. They repalced the HDA(hard disk assembly) and updated the controller. Scientific Micro Systems(OMTI) will repair their controller for $40. These were used in the XP20 and 40. I don't know what the repair cost is for their RLL controler used in the XP30 and 60. Also Boshert will repair the power supplies in older XP drives for $40. So, if your drive is out of warranty it doesn't hurt to contact the drive manufacturer. They should be able to do a better job for less. Be forewarned that you will have to meet their criteria for payment. Some want purchase orders, some require checks. Stephen Sakamoto steph@cs.ucla.edu UCLA Computer Science Department