ron@celerity.UUCP (Ron McDaniels) (08/24/84)
In a previous incarnation (another employer) we used both the
Systems Industry's tri-density tape drives as well as the Eagle
drive/SI controller combo. We had several power failures with
our system and no problems with the tape drive (I could tell you
some horror stories about the other disc drive we HAD to have
on our system to get DEC maintainance on the cpu ;-). The SI
tri-density tape drive is manufactured by Storage Technology, and
is used by numerous OEMs in their tape systems. I did
quite a bit of research on it before we bought ours and it is
well thought of in the industry.
The complaint about the SI tape drive was missing some crucial
information. Was there any power filtering on the mains? If the
power failure was preceeded by a significant overvoltage (quite
common), that might give some very good explainations as to why
the drive fried. Why didn't anything else fry? Ask Murphy.
We had the SI equipment for about 18 months at the time I left my
fromer employeer (all the equipment is still there and working
well today) and we had had nothing but good experience with the
product. SI maintained their part of the system (under maintai-
nance contract) and did so in a timely, competent manner.
I would like to add that the foregoing constitutes my own person-
al opinion and in no way reflects the opinion, either pro or
con (I guess that's what `no way' means ;-), of my em-
ployer, clergyperson or any other sentient being on the
face of this planet.
R. L. (Ron) McDaniels
{decvax || ucbvax || ihnp4 || akgua || philabs}!sdcsvax!celerity!ronfaunt@saturn.UUCP (Doug Faunt) (08/25/84)
I think this was a too broad generalization. We have a number of SI discs, and have had very good service from and on those. We tried an SI tape unit, and for various reasons NOT related to quality of equipment decided not to buy it. The locals who run VMS did. SI is not as big as some other manufacturers, and if you buy their equipment, YOU are more likely to find a bug in it, just because of the smaller amount of equipment in the field. You are also likely to pay less money, because of the lower overhead. One incident is not enough reason to condemn a manufacturer, especially an incident as uncontrolled as a single power failure problem. ....!hplabs!faunt