king@entropy.ms.washington.edu (Jim King) (06/09/87)
Does anyone know anything about the MacStack hard drives from CMS Enhancements, Inc. of Tustin, CA? They are advertised in the June MacUser (page 45). The reason that I am interested is that a local dealer is selling the 20 meg model for $625 with some backup software, etc. The price is right, but I am uneasy that I have not heard of anyone who has tried this drive. The dealer says that CMS is a major PC disk maker looking to be a big deal in the Mac market. Any comments on that? (They weren't the outfit that made the famous AT drives, were they?) Here are some specs: Formatted capacity: 20.6 mb Average Access time: 65 ms Num. heads per drive: 4 Num cyls. per drive: 612 MTBF 20,000 hours Cabinet size 3.5 x 10.5 x 10" External ID select "0" to "6" Warranty 1 year Please send mail and I will post a summary. Jim King UUCP net uw-beaver!uw-entropy!king Internet (arpanet) address: king@entropy.ms.washington.edu Bitnet address: king%entropy.ms.washington.edu@beaver.cs.washington.edu James King Dept of Math Univ of Washington Seattle, WA 98195
dbw@crash.UUCP (06/10/87)
All a CMS 20 MacStack is internally is a Seagate 225N 20 meg drive with a case and power supply. This is the equivalent of half of the Apple HD-20 SCSI and the exact equivalent of the internal hard drive in the MacII. The Hyperdrive FX-20 and Jasmine 20's are also internally Seagate 225N drives. The CMS 20 drive is rugged and has a carrying handle; however, I don't know how safe the data is you carry the drive everywhere. Two of my friends lug the things back and forth to work with losing any data. They, however, format and use the AppleHD-20 SC software instead of the CMS format program. They also use a custom head parking program which I wrote. If you run Disktimer II on a CMS drive that was formatted with CMS software you will find that it is very slow; if you format with the Apple software instead, you will get the same results that the Apple HD-20SC yields. On a BBS in Orange County the CMS programmer admitted that he thought that "blind" reads and writes are unsafe, so his driver uses single block non-blind read and writes only. Anyway my two friends have had no problem with the drive, so it should be a safe buy. CMS also makes a drive which has room for a second drive, so if you get more money you should be able to upgrade this second one with little fuss.
dbw@crash.CTS.COM (David B. Whiteman) (06/10/87)
In my proceeding article I said in error that the CMS 20 is equivalent to half of an Apple HD20 SC I did not mean that two CMS 20's equal an Apple HD20SC, I meant that the internal drive that is in a CMS20, a Seagate 225N, is in about half of the Apple drives that have been sold. Apparently those sold to the West coast have Seagate drives, and those sold to the East coast have Rodime drives. The point is is that the CMS have Seagate drives which are known to be reliable. Furthermore I mentioned that my two friends use the software for the Apple drive to format their CMS drive instead of using the CMS software; I don't know whether this is against some Apple or CMS restriction, or whether the thought police will come after you if you do this. You do lose space -- the CMS software formats it as an 20.5 meg drive and the Apple software only allocates about 19 meg, but you do gain speed if you use the Apple software.