davidb@inmos.co.uk (David Boreham) (10/18/89)
The recent postings on Apollo/3Com Ethernet boards set me thinking about disk drives. What I'd like to know is can you buy bare Maxtor disk drives an upgrade DN3550's with WD7000 controllers to 760Mb ? I know that the 348Mb drives are Maxtor XT4380E, are the 760Mb drives Maxtor XT8760E ? Also are they standard drives like you can buy from bare drive suppliers ? As a supplementary question, does anyone know if the SMS controller cards are available from anyone but apollo ? (The reason for all this is that bare drives cost less than half the apollo upgrade price). Could everyone mail replies and I'll summerise to the net. Thanks. -- David Boreham, INMOS Limited | mail(uk): davidb@inmos.co.uk or ukc!inmos!davidb Bristol, England | (us): uunet!inmos-c!davidb +44 454 616616 ex 543 | Internet : @col.hp.com:davidb@inmos-c
lampi@pnet02.gryphon.com (Michael Lampi) (10/26/89)
From my experience at Danford Corporation, where they sell add-on disk drives
for the DN-xx00 and DN-10000, it is far better to purchase the interface
boards from Apollo that try to do it from their sources, especially in the
case of the OMTI controllers that SMS made for Apollo. We had heard of failure
rates as high as 50% for those controllers as shipped from SMS (this is 2nd
hand, so take it with whatever cautions are desired); hence, it is better to
have Apollo perform the necessary acceptance testing.
As far as the disk drives go, yes, the drives are standard Maxtor 760 mb
drives, and the smaller ones are either Maxtor or Micropolis (take your pick)
380 mb drives.
By the way, I am no longer at Danford (was their Director of Engineering). I'm
in the midst of starting a new company, and am thinking of offering disk
drives and magneto-optical drives for the DN-2500 at low-low prices.
Michael Lampi
President
MDL Corporation
Torrance, CA
FAX (213) 782-7927
TEL (213) 782-7888
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