tuba@ur-tut.UUCP (04/23/87)
Has anyone out there picked up the new hard disk drive(s) from Warp-9? These are the Photon-[234]0 family of drives. Their advertised prices are quite competitive...are the products real, do they perform well, are they reliable, is the company likely to be in business this time next year, does anyone have any information? -- jon
dtw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Duane Williams) (04/23/87)
> Has anyone out there picked up the new hard disk drive(s) from Warp-9?
I am familiar with 5 Photon 20s. Four are the older model and one is the
new model that fits underneath the Mac. Warp Nine claims that the new ones
contain the same drive as the older ones. The four older ones have worked
well for many many months. The new one worked well for three months and
then developed a high-pitched whine, but otherwise worked normally. I
returned it under warranty and received a replacement in 10 days. The
drives' performance is reasonable. They are a bit noisy because they have a
fan, but so do most hard drives. If you don't have a SCSI cable to connect
the drive to your Mac, add about $30 to the advertised price.
The Macintosh Journal published a compartive review of 13 Mac hard disks.
Their review of the Jasmine Direct Drive 20 was very good. It was one of
the fastest drives they tested, was judged to be well built, and is as cheap
as the Photon 20. You should consider it as well.
Duane Williams
(dtw@me.ri.cmu.edu)news@husc6.UUCP (USENET News System) (04/27/87)
[] From: quah@husc4.HARVARD.EDU (danny quah) Path: husc4!quah I've just bought a Photon 20 Warp 9 drive and have been (as expected) wondering how I got along without it. One rather annoying problem has come up in this first week of operation, though. When I turn on the drive and MacPlus (in either order), the Mac will refuse to recognize that there is anything attached to the SCSI bus: consequently, no boot, until I insert a System in the internal drive. When I run Warp-9 Disk Utilities, a SCSI scan again reveals no drive attached. Very annoying. I fiddle around by turning the drive off and then on while the Disk-Util application is closing. By timing it just right (?), I can get a SCSI scan to show positive. I can then go through an Install Drive, but needless to say, all this is a little disturbing. The recommended procedure (from the Photon 20 manual) of replacing the System file doesn't do a whole lot. I am running System 3.2 and Finder 5.3, regular MacPlus with 1 M memory. I have been able to get along thus far, mostly by not shutting down, but I can't see that this is a permanent solution. Nonetheless, I could get by without the down time of sending the drive back. (Not that I *know* a new drive will fix anything in any case ...) Has anyone else had this problem? Is it a scuzzy (i.e. gritty) SCSI cable? connection? drive? Any suggestions? --Danny quah@h-sc4.UUCP or quah@h-sc4.harvard.edu or dquah@mit-athena.ARPA or dquah@ATHENA.MIT.EDU USMail: Dept of Economics, MIT, Cambridge MA 02139. (617)253-0914
smith@umn-cs.UUCP (Richard Smith) (05/03/87)
I've been using a Photon 20 for over six months now and am perfectly satisfied. Well... I am now that I have the New Version of their software. They evidently wrote their first SCSI driver themselves and though it worked "mostly" OK, it wasn't very robust. In fact I went through a crash/reformat/restore cycle about three times the week before I got the new driver. Also, the drive came with virtually NO documentation originally. The Warp 9 people told me was that they hired a consultant who specialized in SCSI drivers to write the new one - he did, it works, and it comes with a manual. The "good" version has "V2.0ext" written in pen on the back of the distribution diskette. The Photon 20 has been boringly reliable since I replaced the driver. Rick.