tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu.UUCP (06/09/87)
A couple of very negative articles about Jasmine hard disk drives were posted last month. I thought I'd throw in my two cents' worth. (This got kinda long, but I think it's all of interest if you're in the market for a hard disk. Shareware authors please read too.) I ordered a Jasmine 80meg drive by phone on May 12, and was promised delivery by May 26. Needless to say, I got pretty nervous when lad's and prune's articles appeared around May 20, but I figured I'd just sit tight and see what happened. I'd used a credit card for the order, so could refuse payment if satisfactory merchandise wasn't delivered... Anyway, the drive appeared on June 5, having been shipped from Jasmine on June 4. [A gold star to Purolator for delivering in less than the advertised two days.] It booted up no problem, and has run flawlessly so far, knock on wood. By all reports, Jasmine is a very small company, and I'd guess they are being swamped by demand for their products. All the same, you'd think they could give a reasonably accurate estimate of ship date, based on the number of orders in the queue. (They may be trying to fix this... prune, ordering a week before I did, was promised delivery in one week compared to my two.) I wonder whether lad's problems with 3 consecutive 80meg drives could have been software-related. It's been stated on the net that System 3.2 had bugs that surfaced with disks over 32megs (65536 sectors... probably using words for sector numbers somewhere). I don't plan to let 3.2 anywhere near my disk. A few words about the 80meg disk itself. *Very* fast; I don't have much personal experience with other Mac hard disks, but operations that are reputed to take a long time with other disks seem pretty quick. For instance, remounting the volume after a crash/reboot only takes a couple of seconds; that's with Jasmine's 10megs of PD/shareware software on the disk. [The previously reported DiskTimer II numbers for this drive agree with mine: 128 read, 126 write, 20 seek. I have a theory that seek time is the real crux of performance on HFS-type directory formats; since the Jasmine's seek number is excellent and R/W times only so-so, the observed performance seems to support the theory. Note: this is vanilla Mac Plus, 128K cache.] Reasonably quiet fan; inaudible compared to the Kensington System Saver fan I have on the Mac itself. Seek noises are just clicks, unlike some other disks that have been described here recently. On the whole, I find the disk much quieter and less annoying than the Mac's internal floppy drive. Automatic (apparently vacuum-driven) head parking at power down. That is a major win in my opinion: you don't have to think about it, and it works in case of a power failure as well as deliberate shutdown. The manual is excellent; it includes sections on backup methods and file recovery techniques as well as the usual setup and care-of-drive stuff. Two hardware misfeatures: first, the SCSI address selector is pushbutton driven, and it's placed so close to the right rear corner of the box that you'll change the address by accident any time you grab the box. The selector should be relocated or else made a thumbwheel or screwdriver type switch. More important, you can't turn on the Mac and the disk simultaneously: you have to give the disk about 10 seconds head start, so that it can complete its powerup selftest before the Mac starts looking for a SCSI disk to boot from. Apparently, whatever the Mac does to search the SCSI bus causes the disk selftest sequence to hang up. If you then reset or turn off the Mac, the selftest continues and seems to complete normally. I haven't heard of other SCSI disks behaving this way; anyone have any ideas on what's going on? It's moderately annoying, because you can't just drive the Mac and the disk off a common power button. The disk is delivered with the latest Apple system software (4.1/5.5, current versions of ResEdit, Switcher, etc), and about 10meg of PD and shareware software. Jasmine seems to do a good job of keeping up to date on new releases of software; I only found a couple of things that didn't seem to be quite the latest version. However, they haven't done a particularly good job of weeding out junk; there is a lot of useless stuff here, as well as numerous programs that crash instantly under System 4.1. (Probably a lot of those were compiled with Megamax C, but I haven't tried applying the generic 02B6->0A78 patch yet.) It's still a nice service for them to perform; if you figure the phone bills and effort involved in downloading the same stuff from BBSes, you start to approach the price of the drive, and you probably would end up with older versions in many cases. They invite shareware authors to send them stuff for inclusion on their disks. I'm sure the quality of their library would go up if more authors did so, and it ought to make a pretty good distribution channel. How about it, folks? In summary, I'm happy with the drive, and would order it again; 80meg for $1400 is tough to beat. Add 10 days to their quoted delivery date, and you probably won't be too far off... tom lane ----- ARPA: lane@ZOG.CS.CMU.EDU UUCP: ...!seismo!zog.cs.cmu.edu!lane BITNET: lane%zog.cs.cmu.edu@cmuccvma
leeke@glacier.UUCP (06/15/87)
It seems from Jasmine's adds that they have the same address as MacWorld
magazine - any relation?
Steve Leeke
--
Steven D. Leeke, Center for Integrated Systems, Stanford University
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"I suppose they don't use money in the 23rd century?"