darryl@ism780c.UUCP (Darryl Richman) (11/29/86)
Well, I couldn't ignore the low price of the Jasmine, and after talking with them for a bit I ordered one. They told me that it would be shipped two weeks later, but after three weeks I called to see what was up. They said that their shipment of drives had arrived two weeks late and so the delivery date would be held up a week. But I got the drive the next day, by Purolator. Since it survived my vibration test (I took it home on my motorcycle--20 miles!), I consider it to be reasonably robust. Since I haven't actually heard any of the other drives that people have complained about, I can't give any comparitive information, but the Jasmine is certainly quieter than the PC/AT's we have at work. It has a fan, but I can't tell if the noise is mostly fan or drive. In any event, I don't consider it to be noisy (even in my study at home), and it certainly doesn't squeal (well, not after one week). The drive is a Seagate 225 and is mounted in a box 2" high and just slightly larger than the Mac's footprint. The box certainly seems well built, but the louvres in front have some air-filtration material behind them and the disk's seek light is behind that--it looks a bit cheesy. It has a decimal switch on the back for selecting the SCSI device number, and a small compartment on the underside can be opened to change the resistance if there are a lot of devices daisy chained together. It also has two switched, three pronged outlets on the back which include surge suppression. It plugged right in and worked. It is also loaded with about 12.5 Mb of various PD stuff, most of it old and crufty, but some surprisingly good. They also provide two desk accessories to park the heads and mount the drive when booting from floppy (why not make one DA and save the precious slot for the user?), and they also give you a format program. There is NO backup software provided; I have ordered Flashback. Until I feel secure, I'm not going to try the format program. The drive comes with 3:1 interleaving. So far, I'm very pleased with it. Eventually I'll probably run Disk Timer on it, but for now I hardly care--the performance improvement over floppies is dramatic enough. It comes with a 30 day money back guarantee and a 1 year parts and labor warranty. Of course, the standard disclaimers apply--I'm just relating my experiences as a satisfied customer. --Darryl Richman, INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. ...!cca!ima!ism780!darryl The views expressed above are my opinions only.
gold@cdx39.UUCP (02/12/87)
A friend of mine has been dealing with Jasmine for a couple
of months now. First he ordered their disk with a scsi
adapter for his 512kE, it did'nt work. He returned the goods
and received his refund.
Then he upgraded to a MAC Plus and ordered another hard
disk from Jasmine...it didn't work either. He sent it back and
received the same drive with a new cable...it worked fine, but
he could not reformat it. He sent it back yet another time and,
yesterday, he received a new drive. My friend then hooked it
up, but the machine would not boot...he then reformatted it, and
it has been working well now for about 24 hours. I will write
back if it has any problems.
In summary from my friends experiences and net responses, it appears
that jasmine has a good disk, but may have flakey scsi adapter problems
(for those of without Mac Plus), and may have some flakey cables.
One very important thing is that they appear to be very sincere
and helpful in dealing with problems until they are worked out.
In conclusion, if you want a hard disk for your Mac, you should
look into Jasmine's products.
Mark Goldstein
Codex Corporation, Motorola Information Systems Group, Canton, MA
path: ...{mit-eddie,harvax,inmet,adelie,mot}!cdx39!gold
P.S. I am not a MacIntosh user or a Jasmine Direct Drive user,
but I do own some Apple stock.