gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu (03/21/88)
I have a Mac II and a CMS-80 innerdrive (Quantum). I recommend it
highly. For a long time, I believe CMS has had the best prices on
Quantum-80 disk drives. I got mine for $1213 mail order 5 months ago,
$200 cheaper than anyone else's. CMS is one of the biggest drive
makers (4-5 yrs old) for the IBM PC, and recently entered the Mac
market..
Many of the 16.5ms drives are CDC Wren drives. Check out the Jasmine
Innerdrive-91 add to see the reliability specs on this drive -- they
are somewhat better than a Quantum-80 (MTBF- 30Khrs, v.s. 25Khrs).
Go for a drive with a 2yr or greater warranty, if you can. Thus,
don't buy Apple drives, their warranty is horrible (3mo).
I am very suspicious that the Magic91 is a Wren-type drive. If it is,
I think it's probably a bargain in the $1300 range... If you ever
want to run A/UX on your Mac II, all you care about is fast seek time
for paging purposes!!!
Do you really want to use your disk with a future Mac II? The
interleave will be 2:1 or greater, and the performance on your Mac II
will suffer. For full performance, you'll want to reformat at 1:1
interleave. After reformatting, will the drive work with your Mac
Plus? I don't know. Anyhow, MAKE SURE THE MANUFACTURER SUPPORTS
CHANGING THE INTERLEAVE (CMS Does), if you want to do this. A few
months ago, some manufacturers had not yet released 1:1 interleave or
1Mbps SCSI disk drives.
Maybe you should wait four months until Apple releases the new
MacII/SE combo machine. That might mix things up a lot.
Don Gillies {ihnp4!uiucdcs!gillies} U of Illinois
{gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu}