riddle@emory.uucp (Larry Riddle) (09/22/88)
Last week I posted an inquiry soliciting opinions on hard disk drives for a Macintosh SE. Here is a summary of the responses I received. First I would like to thank everyone who responsed. Your comments were very informative and helpful. ------------ I have been using a Seagate 60 meg internal in my Mac ][ for 6mo. and have had really good luck with it. I imagine that it is the same internals as the cms 60. The only problem I hade was partioning it but I finally got the right utils from my dealer, and everything worked out fine. ------------ I have a CMS 60 Mb internal on my Mac II and have had zero (0) problems wit it and wouldn't trade it for any other 60Mb (maybe a 330Mb priam, but..) I got mine from a Mail order place called hardware house in pennsylvania, for about $695/$699 or so. Shipped 1 day later. Got it FedEx 2 days after that. ------------ I have a Jasmine inner-Drive 45 for my II that I'm real happy with. In addition to the SUM and Redux software, the Jasmine DriveWare (partition control software (A CDEV)) is nice, and there is also ~10 Meg of publicdomain/shareware/demos of varying quality and usefulness. I have friends with other Jasmine products and they are all very happy with them. ------------- I will givew you a story and ask for a favor. I have (had?) a Jasmine 20 for about 1.5 years. It was OK for almost 1 year. After that it started loosing blocks and I had to reformat/reload many times to seal-off bad blocks. Finally the drive died -- did not even spin. It was under warranty. I sent it back and it was fixed in about 10 days (not 48 hrs as claimed). Looks like the major portion of the drive was replaced -- it sounded completely differently. Two days ago drive died again (it spins normally, but nor recognized by any diagnostic software). I did determine that drive was the problem, not cable, not mac. I just sent it to Jasmine, but they said (w/o looking at the drive) that probable cost of repair is $250-300. They will call me in about a week with the precise estimate (it will take a week before they have a chance to look at the drive). I decided that it would not be a good investment (since 20 meg is small for me anyway) to pay for the repair. Hence, I am like ly to be looking for a new drive in a week or so. I do not mean to imply that jasmine is a bad company, I probably just had a bad sample. I am also looking at CMS 60 ($749 at MacLand) as a prime candidate. I just saw in MacWeek another company X with the follwing prices: 20M/65 ms -$499 30M/28ms -- $549 40M/12ms -- 699 50M/28ms - 699 60M/40ms - 699 800-622-3384 One or two year warranty. ------------- You should seriously consider a Micah Drive. They sell an 80MB unit for $999. It uses the same drive that Apple uses (the Quantum Q280), it's fast, comes with 15 MB of PD software, 6MB of HC Stacks, a 2 year warranty, and an 800 # for support. They're right here on the east coast too, a plus because their hours are the same as yours, calling the west coast can be a pain. Their software does formatting, partitioning, and scanning/repairing of the drive. The manual is good, but their support is the best. Before you buy I'd call them. Their # is 1 800 782 0097. Ask for Matt Marshall (that's the guy I spoke to). ----------- I happen to be an owner of a CMS SD 60 for approx. 6 months now and I must say I am very pleased. Not a single bad block (knock...knock) since I owned it, never a software problem that I could attribute to CMS's programming. It is, however, NOT the best drive available - it is not the fastest (as you know, 40ms access time isn't great). To me, I can't see shelling out $1300 for a 60-80 meg with 18-23 ms access time - it's just not worth it! I use the drive for two main purposes - for a single storage device w/all my appls & data files AND for convenience of not having to swap disks or worry about system file size constraints. If you want the best buy with these philosophies in mind, the CMS SD60 delivers the best bang for the buck. Finally, I might add their driver software is not the most terrific (in fact, they suggest formatting the drive at a 5:1 interleave). The 277-N Seagate drive CAN do better than that, as I have just proven to myself today. Someone graciously sent me the Gigasoft installer which allows you to format/partition a CDC Wren, Seagate, or Miniscribe disk. The disktimer II results w/CMS drivers on 1:5 interleave was about 150, 150, 14. After reformatting with a 3:1 interleave w/GigaSoft's software, Disktimer II was 95, 95, 11 - a significant improvement. Obviously, I haven't had the time to actually use the drive, but things seem to work well. Unfortunately, the SCSI Accellerator INIT (1.2) doesn't seem to work with GigaSoft's SCSI drivers (it didn't work with CMS's drivers either, so I think I'm still ahead of the game). I bought the drive for $795 at Hardware House (+ ~$15 for shipping). Although I haven't checked recently, I suspect that price is still fairly competitive. Above all, GOOD LUCK! Everyone can get a good drive OR a bad drive no matter what kind you buy. I've just heard good things about Seagate, so when I found their drive for $795/60 megs, I jumped at the opportunity. A buddy of mine bought the same drive at the same time and the power-supply went bad, got a new one, and had one or two bad blocks pop up in the last couple months. I think the key here is not to rely on it as a primary storage device for data files - just applications that are backed up on floppies. Let me know what you decide on! (ps - 60 megs is really not as much as you think it will be - I've got about 15 megs of sounds I digitized, and the rest are applications; virtually none is used by my data files.) ------------ >Microtech Nova 50 meg > Currently on sale. Salesman claims their drive is rated in top 10% > for speed, although admits access time is only 65 ms. But claims that > just access time is not a good way to compare performance. One of the > very nice features of this drive is a 5 year warranty. This drive was > chosen by Dartmouth College for exclusive sale to students and > staff. Top 10% is bogus, but he's a salesman too. Don't know about this one (no experience, that's all) >CMS 60 meg > Uses a Seagate drive. Best feature: good price locally. > 40 ms access time. 1 year warranty. I installed two of these 6 months ago. Nice! Sit under the Mac, not too loud, _good_ software. CMS and Seagate are nice big reliable companies, too. This is the one I recommend to people in that price range. >Jasmine 45 meg > Well known for providing good reliable drives. Comes with SUM and > Redux backup software. 40 ms access time. 1 year warranty. Good drive, but I'd say the CMS is a much better $$/M deal. ------------ I'll offer a quick endorsement of the CMS SD-60. I have had mine for about 9 months now and have had no problems with it. It comes with decent utility software for the drive, features auto head parking on power-down, fits pretty well under the Mac Plus I have, and seems fairly speedy. The fan is a bit obtrusive, though I have now gotten used to it. (How much the noise affects you will largely be determined by the background noise level of your working environmenmt.) So, I am quite happy with mine and purchase another, given the same circumstances again. ----------- Sorry - I didn't answer the questions you had about noise and size. The CMS 60 is very quiet, no screeching, etc. yet. It is approximateely 2.5" to 3" tall, with the same footprint as the Mac, though it is white (not beige). It has a single green LED that indicates disk accesses. A DIP-switch on the back allows you to set the SCSI ID of the drive. Utilities included allow you to : o Change the hard-disk ICON (whoop-dee-dee) o Fast SCSI-toSCSI copy o Non-destructive sector test o Destructive r/w test o Display usage map o Display drive statistics o Move faulty sectors ------------ I bought a CMS 60-meg drive back in May, and am quite pleased. I've experience with Apple drives and MacBottom, and I prefer the CMS to both - good software comes with it for installation and testing, though you might want to get a disk-defragmenter and backup utility, as the CMS doesn't come with one. The CMS appears quite fast, and I've had no problems with it at all - left on continously since May (with surge protection, of course :-) ------------- I have been using a CMS 60 inside my Mac2 for about a year. It has caused no problems. They use an ST277N for all their 60's with no modifications. You can get a bare drive for about $450 sans case. I did this for my second drive and can't see any difference. -------------- I'm not certain if it's indicative of a general problem, but just recently I've had several Nova drives develop problems. The two specific cases I saw were probably due to bad software, not the drives themselves, but I have heard of problems from other people which may be drive-induced. I would go with the Jasmine myself; I would expect it to be relatively stable, it is cheap, and you get good software with it. ------------- -- Larry Riddle | riddle@mathcs.emory.edu PREFERRED Emory University | {decvax,gatech}!emory!riddle UUCP Dept of Math and CS | riddle@emory NON-DOMAIN BITNET Atlanta, GA 30322 | (404) 727-7922 AT&T