ron_b@apollo.COM (Ronald Buttiglieri) (03/16/89)
Hello Netland! Here's my delema: I'm trying to decide how I should buy a Mac SE..
Mac SE with 20meg internal, or a Mac SE with dual 800k and an aftermarket
external 30meg.
What are the pros and cons of each?
So far, here's a list of what I consider the main issues.
Mac SE w/20 meg internal
------------------------
Pros:
- compact, very portable (little concearn to me)
- It's Apple, so it *will* work (ie. designed for it)
- Repairs (if needed) are taken to place of purchase (repaired in-house)
Cons:
- If it needs repair, I lose the *whole* computer for a period of time
- It's only ;^) 20 meg.
Mac SE w/ dual 800k drives and aftermarket 30 meg external
----------------------------------------------------------
Pros:
- If it (the hard drive) needs repair, I still have the Mac.
- Actually cheaper (overall price) than setup above AND I get an extra
diskette drive and 10 meg FOR FREE (sort of).
Cons:
- If the hard drive needs repair, it'll have to be shipped, etc. probably
taking a month or so for the actual repair.
- WHICH DRIVE DO I CHOOSE? There are many on the market, good possibility of
ending up with a lemon? (I'm looking at the MacLand Ozicom(sp?) 30meg for $499.
Ya heard of it?)
Right now I'm leaning towards the latter deal, but every 10 minutes or so
my mind changes! AAARRRGGHHH! (painful)
Also, I'm unsure of the specs on Apples internal drive (like DTR and access time).
Could someone send me these as well?
I would very much like to hear your opinion on this since I can't seem to hold
a contiguous thought for very long any more (my boss don't like that).
Much obliged,
Ron
ron_b@apollo.com
As always, email direct if possible to keep the net uncluttered. If enough
interest arises, I'll post a summary.gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu (03/18/89)
Mac SE w/20Mb Hard Drive
MORE Con's:
1. The warranty on Apple's hard drive is a "generous" 90 days (*snicker*).
Most 3rd party drives come with 2-5 year waranties. Hard drives
often break by self-destructing, making it necessary to junk the
entire drive. So a long warranty is a NECESSITY.
2. The Apple drive is amazingly slow. Something like 85ms accesss time.
It is easy to get a 40ms or even 28ms hard drive from a 3rd party
company. This makes a WORLD of differences in certain applications,
especially databases and hypercard.
3. For about the same money, you can usually get a THIRTY megabyte
INTERNAL 3rd party drive that is faster, with a longer warranty.
Yes, a handful of companies make INTERNAL drives that let you keep
your two floppies and drive ALL in the SE case. This is extremely
convenient, and saves $100 for an enclosure, power supply, etc.
Go for the 3rd-party drive.englandr@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Scott Englander) (03/21/89)
In article <76000372@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > >Mac SE w/20Mb Hard Drive >MORE Con's: >1. The warranty on Apple's hard drive is a "generous" 90 days (*snicker*). > Most 3rd party drives come with 2-5 year waranties. Hard drives > often break by self-destructing, making it necessary to junk the > entire drive. So a long warranty is a NECESSITY. > >2. The Apple drive is amazingly slow. Something like 85ms accesss time. > It is easy to get a 40ms or even 28ms hard drive from a 3rd party > company. This makes a WORLD of differences in certain applications, > especially databases and hypercard. > >3. For about the same money, you can usually get a THIRTY megabyte > INTERNAL 3rd party drive that is faster, with a longer warranty. > Yes, a handful of companies make INTERNAL drives that let you keep > your two floppies and drive ALL in the SE case. This is extremely > convenient, and saves $100 for an enclosure, power supply, etc. > >Go for the 3rd-party drive. Here is a report on this issue which takes a different point of view: (lifted off CONTACT ADTECH at pucc.princeton.edu, written by Phillip Thompson) __________________________________ General Thoughts on Selecting SCSI Drives The goal of the project was to determine the best large-capacity SCSI hard disk drive for an AppleShare file server. Stringing together 20-, 40-, or even 80-megabyte drives just didn't seem to make sense, especially considering the more economical price/megabyte ratio and the generally faster speed of the larger models. Something in the 100-meg and up range appeared desirable. Now, after many weeks of research into the matter, 150 MB looks about right, since that's where the price drops to about $10/meg for the ones we consider best -- among other reasons. Apple doesn't sell anything larger than 80MB SCSI drives at present, or else we would probably have just gone with them. Why? Well, even if their prices are higher, you always know that Apple will support their drives and they won't be apt to "break" every time a new version of the System Software comes out. This latter consideration has led us in the past to be wary of any drive that boasted special facilities for better-than-Apple performance. The matter of guaranteed support takes on added importance when we look at our immediate experience. We know of a couple of failures of Apple SCSI drives. In both cases a component had to be replaced and there was a minimum labor charge. Each was repaired by the local authorized Apple dealer within a couple of days, there was no data lost, and the bill was less than $100. Contrast this to the Everex EMAC-40D drive that we used happily for 13 months. It wasn't flashy, but it was reliable and cost about $850 with our educational discount. One month beyond warranty it failed. We described the symptoms to their support people in careful detail, hoping they could suggest additional diagnostics to try. When we told them the serial number they didn't even suggest that we should send it back for them to do a problem determination. They were no longer using the particular drive in that model, and their supplier wouldn't repair it. All they could do is put in another type drive at a fixed price of $800! (Since we had really nothing to lose, we "worried" it back to life; but that's another story.) If we'd gone that route and the new drive had lasted another year, our total cost would have been significantly greater than that of a comparable Apple drive that we can always get repaired rather inexpensively on a time-and-material basis or cover with AppleCare for about $120 a year. And with Everex there would always be the chance that they would have changed drive suppliers again by the next time we had trouble. This brings up one of the really disturbing things about even the most popular of the third-party SCSI drive vendors. They are continuously changing the type disks they put inside their box without changing model numbers. SuperMac and Jasmine are especially guilty, and they are among those that are still using in some models the old drives designed for the IBM-PC with the PC-type ST506 controller plus bridge card, rather than the proper drives that have embedded SCSI controllers. (See the November 15th issue of MacWeek for details on how this keeps them from being able to work with the LaserWriter II NTX.) So model number alone may not tell what's under the hood. In the advertising wars among third-party disk vendors MTBF (mean time between failures) and now warranty period get big play. MTBF is obviously of little importance when it's just a number much larger than the warranty period. And what happens if the drive fails after the warranty is up? Most vendors are very vague about this, but it depends on the drive manufacturer --| therefore he's important. So far, we have not been able to find disk repair services that will work on SCSI drives. You have to go back to the vendor, and what do you do if the vendor has gone out of business (as several of those in the Mac area have in the past couple of years)? Usually individuals can't get repairs directly from the manufacturer. Well, let's assume you've picked a vendor you think will be in business for the next several years, that he tells you what kind of drives he's using and they are reliable, that the software is sensible (you really don't want to depend of special drivers), and the price is favorable. What about performance? We quickly learned that on a file server, any differences between drives is easily wiped out by variations on the LAN. With the server turned off we could see measurable differences among the drives in doing a 9-megabyte file transfer. These differences were corroborated by seek and transfer-rate tests performed with the two most popular Mac hard disk measuring programs, Disk Timer II and SCSI Evaluator. However, it is our contention that very few people would actually notice much of a significant difference in the performance of any of the larger drives. The bottom line on our project for finding large capacity SCSI hard disks for Mac file servers is that we may not be able to recommend the best unit, but we have learned some of the important factors in making such a choice. The expected longevity of the company is of great importance. A long warranty is good, but after-warranty repair arrangements may be even more significant. Concentrate more on getting a current model drive mechanism with embedded SCSI controller from a reliable manufacturer than on performance or MTBF specs. Go for a good price/meg ratio, but beware of putting too many (m)eggs in one basket -- five 150-meg units are probably more versatile than one 750-meg giant and you'll probably have to partition any really large drive to limit the number of resources in the Desktop for safety and acceptable performance. Finally, don't forget facilities for backing up all this storage. -PhTh *** CREATED 11/23/88 12:56:44 BY PHTH *** -- - Scott