brant@manta.pha.pa.us (Brant Cheikes) (11/19/88)
This past Sunday manta's 40 Mb Hitachi drive bit the dust after 1.5 yr of continuous service. It has since been replaced with a Seagate ST4096 80 Mb (28 ms). I had nearly complete recent backups, so restoration was relatively painless. A couple observations follow. First, thanks are in order to two good net-friends: Kevin O'Gorman and Brendan Reilly. Kevin put up with several telephone consultations and pointed me to Fred Burgess of Mipro, a fellow who reconditions hard drives (I'll be sending Fred my Hitachi in the near future). Brendan had the guts to lend me his spare 7300 to perform some hardware tests with. Without these folks and the bits of info I've picked up off the netnoise, I am sure that manta's recovery would have been far less expeditious and much more of a hassle. I bought the ST4096 from Harmony Computers in Brooklyn. The drive was $579 plus $24 for UPS 2nd-day shipment. I placed the order on Tuesday morning, the drive appeared on Thursday morning. Standard disclaimers apply---I'm just a satisfied customer. There were two minor problems with the drive, both stemming from the fact that it came configured for drop-in installation into an IBM PC-AT. Problem 1: the drive had "rails" affixed to each side of it, clearly to fit an AT's chassis. These rails must be removed before the drive will fit into a 3b1's disk drive mounting cabinet. Unfortunately, they were affixed with special screws; I spent some time running around Penn's engineering labs looking for the right tool. It turns out that you need a size-10 "tork" (sp?). Problem 2: the drive came configured to respond as drive 1 instead of drive 0. There was a little clip-on jumper on the underside of the drive that had to be moved from the second position on a set of pins to the first position. Once that was done, the drive passed all the diagnostics, formatted fine, etc. My only remaining complaint about the drive is that disk seeks seem to generate more momentary vibration than were produced by the Hitachi. -- Brant Cheikes University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science brant@manta.pha.pa.us, brant@linc.cis.upenn.edu, bpa!manta!brant
wtr@moss.ATT.COM (11/23/88)
In article <445@manta.pha.pa.us> brant@manta.pha.pa.us (Brant Cheikes) writes: >This past Sunday manta's 40 Mb Hitachi drive bit the dust after 1.5 yr >of continuous service. It has since been replaced with a Seagate >ST4096 80 Mb (28 ms). >Problem 1: the drive had "rails" affixed to each side of it, >clearly to fit an AT's chassis. [ to remove rails,...] > It turns out that you need a size-10 "tork" (sp?). had the same problem when i installed a seagate in my former sperry AT clone. the proper sized allen (hex) driver will do in a pinch. >Problem 2: the drive came configured to respond as drive 1 instead of >drive 0. There was a little clip-on jumper on the underside of the >drive that had to be moved... same problem. my advice to anyone going to play with any seagate drive is to call up seagate (some 800-number) and request them to send you their "universal seagate manual" which contains basic info on configuring/jumper settings for all of their drives. it was *free* (yes, that's right) and well worth the effort. >Brant Cheikes ===================================================================== Bill Rankin Bell Labs, Whippany NJ (201) 386-4154 (cornet 232) email address: ...!att!moss!wtr