chris@umbc3.UMD.EDU (Chris Schanzle) (03/14/88)
Since I got several requests for information on the CMS SD60 external SCSI hard drive I just purchased for $795 + $24.50 (shipping Federal Express 2nd day & handling), what follows is a pseudo-review of the drive and my experiences with it in the past week of bliss. To summarize, I'm very pleased with my purchase and would highly recommend this drive to anyone seeking reasonably quick, very affordable mass storage device. Call the HardWare House @ 1-800-356-2892 in Philadelphia, PA for more info! The CMS SD60 external SCSI hard drive arrived complete with 24 page manual, cable, 800K floppy with release 5.0 system software and utility programs, and power cord. Physical attributes: approximately the same footprint of the Mac Plus (3.5 x 10.5 x 10"). The front is recessed where the cover plate of the hard drive and in-use indicator light is located. The black front coverplate looks like it's hiding an IBM hard drive. The SD 60 is only available in platinum (I have an beige plus :-(). There are two 25 (yes 25) pin connectors on the back of the drive rather than the 50 pin jobs normall found (but I think this is better, since I wouldn't have to buy a 50-to-50 pin connector to daisy-chain drives!). The dip switches for setting the SCSI ID are also located on the back of the drive for easy access. I just noticed a front-view picture of the drive in one of CMS's ads in MacUser (actually an ad for their tape drive - but the box is the same). After taking the cover off, I found a small fan in the back, a power supply, and of course the drive. There is a sticker on the drive labeled "ST-277N", Seagate's notation - so I assume it's a Seagate drive. The following information comes from the specifications in the Appendix of the manual: Heads auto-park at power down Formatted capacity = 62.40MB Average access time = 40 ms Non-operating shock = 60g (sticker on drive says 40g max tho) Reliability - MTBF = 20,000 External SCSI ID Select: 0 through 6 One Year Warranty The software that is included appears to be a very polished product (I was very impressed). After selecting the SCSI ID and the drive model, one can perform many functions: Format - erases all blocks and marks out bad ones. Initialize - creates Mac specific directory information Install New Drivers - in case the ones get trashed. Park - for drives that do not park on power down. SCSI Bus Status - self explanitory. Volume Data - lots of block allocation information Usage Map - graphically plots used blocks (nice!) Overnight Test - erases all information (hours to complete) Verify disk - trys to read each block (data not modified) Reassign block - if a block goes bad, one can map it to another block to avoid reformatting. Fast HD Copy - block by block copy to anther drive. Select Drive Icon - you can choose one of several given (or use Resedit to modify theirs and install it). Nice touch. Shutdown/Restart - for use after using the Park function. All of these functions are documented in the manual and in the on-line help. There is also extensive help in the manual about using HFS efficiently and what to do if you experience problems. When one selects FORMAT, a dialog box requests which model Macintosh the drive will be used on. Then a dialog box allows you to override the interleave they suggest to give best performance on the different Macs. They warn "capricious changes will likely be regretted." The interleaves suggested are 5, 3, and 1 for the Mac Plus, Mac SE, and Mac II respectively. The drive is shipped configured for a Mac+, preformatted and with Apple's System Software release 5.0 (MultiFinder included!) and their utility software. They also include a program called "ZapPRAM" which does the obvious (same thing as holding down Shift-Option-Command and then open the Control Panel). This is only useful for the Mac SE/II users. There is also an "PRAMFIX" INIT for Mac II users to help avoid it from getting confusing PRAM information. They didn't say much about it in their README document about it. Running DiskTimer II (vers 1.0) gives the following information: 100 24KB Reads, Writes: 158, 159 deciseconds 80 seeks across 1MB: 14 deciseconds Personally I never paid any attention to the previous postings of these numbers, but I hope someone will find them useful. It would be interesting to see how it compares to the other drives that are available (where are those info-mac archives when you need 'em!?). Comments: I've been waiting for almost a year for hard drive prices to become reasonable, and this one finally gave me the most storage for the right price. How could I not be happy? Personally, I purchased the drive for more of the convience factors (BIG system file, all applications in one location) as I did for the speed increase. For me, 40ms is lots faster than the 80ms numbers of the recent past. Sure, the Quantum 80 Meg drives are in the mid 20-s ms access times, but they cost $300-$500 more! (BTW, they do have an SD80 model that has an access time of 26ms) for $1100 something. The drive is slightly more noisy than I would prefer, but I wouldn't call it LOUD by any means - those SE fans are definitly louder and much more obnoxious. On spinup, the drive sounds like the turbines from an X-Wing fighter taking off in Star Wars - neato-torpedo! Being a Seagate drive (assumption based on ST-277N notation discussed earlier), I have high hopes that this will be a reliable drive. Myself and a friend ordered two drives at the same time (they let the shipping costs slide) from a batch they JUST got in. Unfortunately, his drive crapped out on him after about an hour's worth of use, and had to send it back. It was doing weird things like not spinning up, changing speed after a few minutes of operation, & giving SCSI errors out the wazoo. The people at HardWare house were pleasant to deal with, but seemed rather non-professional like the business was run by a family rather than a company. This doesn't bother me since, if I have problems, CMS is a pretty big company and I can deal with them directly should the (unfortunate) need arise. After running the drive continously for 5 days and powering up and down for the last two days, I'm happy to report no problems with the drive or any software I've put on it (15 megs and counting!). At this point in the evolution of SCSI disks, I didn't expect to find any. Rounding all this out, I think I've covered most aspects that would interest those looking for a good buy in SCSI disks. If you have questions, feel free to mail me at the address below. Naturally, the standard disclaimers apply - I'm not affiliated with anybody but myself. -- ARPA : chris@umbc3.UMD.EDU BITNET : chris@umbc "He was betrayed by the limits of his own potential."