endrizzi@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Michael J. Endrizzi) (02/14/90)
Has any MacRag or past news article been done on rating Hard Disk Reliability. I am looking for a drive for my SE. Got any good horror stories to give me. What should I stay away from. Thanks Dreez
escher@apple.com (Mike Crawford) (02/14/90)
In article <1990Feb13.223721.11907@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> endrizzi@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Michael J. Endrizzi) writes: > I am looking for a drive for my SE. Got > any good horror stories to give me. ... I have a Mac 512K that we bought Mac Plus Roms for, and a third-party SCSI port. I got a 135 Mb Fujitsu M 22-something SA off an ad in the misc.forsale for $695 including shipping & COD charges, with a 30 day replacement warranty. The fellow had obtained it at low cost from and unclaimed freight depot. From the start the drive did not work. First thing I had done was load it chock full o' viruses, as I had only been using floppies before and they were a pain to check. Copying small files would work OK, copying large ones would always get an error. I decided to reformat the drive, but it had come formatted, without the formatting software, so I had to buy that for about $100 from Software Architects in Seattle (formerly Carl Nelson Associates). They were quite prompt about getting me the software. In the meantime I played around with SF&I from Ephraim Vishniac@think.com It appears that there is a standard SCSI command for verifying, which the drive did not support. When SF&I reported that it was verifying, it would finish in a few seconds. The drive came with a defect list, but I had no way of getting the one off the drive. The software architects software did not do any verification (would have felt it a good deal if it had -- no reason the verify could be done by the formatter, instead of the drive). Somewhere in there I drove up to Berkeley to MAC, who went out of their way to help me try to format it with SilverLining, which comes with SilverServer, using their store demo copy. I said I would buy it if I knew it worked, as these formatters need to know about your particular drive. It would format and "verify" and try to reboot, and hang. Glumly I drove back. Berkeley is a long ways away from Santa Cruz. When the SA Fujitsu Installer arrived, it seemed to work, but no go on the copying test. I called them, got to talk to Carl Nelson himself, who suggested it was the cable (I had to put together my own case, power supply, and cable). Over a few phone calls, I got a good cable put together. My first cable was heisted from the scrap pile of a synthesizer factory. Take a look at the internal cable of your SCSI devices, if you can do so without voiding your warranty. You are likely to find that the ground lines on your cable are not connected at one or both ends. This helps it pick up electrical garbage inside the drive case. While I was working with SF&I, I called Fujitsu America to try to get the manual on the drive, so I would be able to configure SF&I for the commands my drive supported. It took a few phone calls before I could get ahold of anyone at Fujitsu who professed to know how to get the manual, and when I showed up at their lobby to pick it up, I was presented with a two-page glossy sales brochure, explaining how great my drive would be if it worked. After a few more phone calls they gave me the number of a retailer who would sell me the manual, if only they had it in stock. Fixing the cable helped, but did not cure the problem. Copying a 300K file had about a 50% chance of error. I was really sweating now, and my 30 days was about up. The fellow who sent it to me said he would honor the warranty if I could prove it was the drive, but then he was in Tennessee, and I had just burned $900 of my partnership's money, for the drive, case, power supply, and formatting software (We made $40 last year, gross. Not yet showing a profit.) Being a Unix System Administrator at the time, I knew that things like disks got busted for arcane reasons, and I was not totally sure it was the disk, as the Tennessee fellow swore it worked when he tried. I feared it had been damaged in transit, or that I had fried it from static electricity while handling it. Eventually, a different brand of third party SCSI port was borrowed from the same synthesizer factory that supplied the original SCSI cable, and the drive worked fine. I had bought the port about 6 months before, and it was still in warranty, and the vendor agreed to supply the replacement. When it arrived, I was a happy, and ever so repentant boy. By the way, those SCSI ports plug into the ROM sockets, and the ROMs then plug into sockets on the SCSI board, as the MacPlus has no expansion bus. Our warranty ran screaming into the night years ago. Our case is now a tastefully done black and green faux granite, by the way. My advice: get a Hewlett-Packard drive with a 5-year warranty. At the very least, settle for no more than 1 year. Buy it locally, so you can go in and throttle the vendor if it does not work. Get AppleCare on your SE. Next time: my third party memory board, and my drunken electrical engineer housemate. Can you say "Sad Mac"? Our board has leads _SOLDERED_ to the leads of the 68000 chip. Michael D Crawford Oddball Enterprises Inc. oddball!mike@ucscc.ucsc.edu Consulting for Apple Computer Inc. (Now that I know how to hack a mac!) escher@apple.com These are my own opinions. No one else may have them.