ephraim@wang.UUCP (11/21/86)
In a recent Delphi digest, HSTARR asks for info about the Quantum Q280. As luck would have it, I've got one running on a Mac Plus here at Wang. The Q280 is a 5-1/4" half-height drive with embedded SCSI controller. Nominal drive capacity is 80 megabytes. The SCSI support is pretty standard but: I could not get the drive to run with any of the Apple SCSI manager read/write routines. Neither normal reads/writes nor blind ones were reliable. The drive would *sometimes* boot, *sometimes* run for a while, then bomb unpredictably. The frustrating part was that simple sequential access was perfectly reliable, so simple test programs to check disk integrity gave it a clean bill of health. It only croaked on random accesses. The fix was to substitute my own fully synchronized read/write routines. Needless to say, the Q280 will be supported by the next release of SF&I. Ephraim Vishniac decvax!wanginst!wang!ephraim