saf@moss.ATT.COM (07/17/87)
Several months ago, I bought a Jasmine 20 meg drive. It contains a Seagate
225N drive. Jasmine included two formatters - one which just did the basic
job and one which did "diagnostics." A friend recently bought "the same"
Jasmine drive - there was no mention of what hardware was in the box (all
references to Seagate have been removed) and there was only one formatter,
which may or may not do diagnostics.
His drive has major problems, in that it intermittently won't pass its
internal diagnostics. When it does, and we (sucessfully) format it, we
get occasional read and write errors when using the disk. Clearly, he
needs a replacement unit.
Just for laughs, we tried using my diagnostic formatter. It gets fatal SCSI
errors even when his controller seems to initialize correctly.
Conclusions: 1) Jasmine is no longer using the Seagate drive. At least not
exclusively.
2) There is something in the old diagnostic formatter
which only works on 225N drives.
3) The current formatter finds no fault with the drive yet the
finder gets occasional read and write errors so it can't be
doing very complete diagnostics if it does any at all.
Questions to the net:
1) Does anyone know what drive Jasmine is currently using?
(The Seagate was a selling point in my book, and was the
main reason I recommended Jasmine to my friends! Rats!)
2) Just what level of diagnostics is being done by the old
and/or new formatters? What level of diagnostics should be
done? What software is available that pounds on disks?
For the record: We have collectively bought 4 Jasmine 20 Meg drives. Two
have needed to be replaced. One was a Segate 225N (my unit)
and one is an unknown. This does not strike me as a very
impressive record although the statistical sample is too
tiny to really tell.
Are all "homeowner-type" drives this tempermental/sensitive/finicky/unreliable?
Steve Falco