cash@zug.csmil.umich.edu (Howard Cash) (11/13/89)
If you are considering upgrading your Mac to a IIci you may be in for a surprise with your external hard drive. Certain manufacturers did not exactly follow Apple's scsi guidelines and now they are being bitten. According to someone I spoke to at Apple DTS, at least three disk drive manufacturers have made disks that will not automount on the IIci. There may be others. The same source at Developer Technical Support says that all of the manufacturers with this problem have acknowledged their errors in this regard and will upgrade their hardware for affected customers. ALL EXCEPT MICROTECH INTERNATIONAL, makers of Nova hard drives. I bought a $1500.00, 120MB hard drive from microtech about a year ago. The first drive I received was defective - (the dip-switches on the back could not be used to set the SCSI address). After a great deal of inconvenience they replaced it with a drive that looked as if it had been dropped. When that one finally failed and they replaced IT, I thought I finally had a working drive. Unfortunately, I cannot use it with my IIci. After several hours on the phone with Microtech service people and managers, I was told that my best bet was to "sell it for what I can and buy a new drive." One manager defended this suggestion on the grounds that "Microtech cannot be responsible for maintaining compatibility with changing technologies." She went on to point out that they were legally safe because that limitation is written into their warrantee. If you want to avoid similar problems, I highly discourage anyone from buying microtech products. I have not done benchmarks and cannot make reliable reports on the speed of their drives, but their service is inexcusable. These are my own oppinions but details and names of people I talked to are available to those who may be affected. -Howard Cash cash@csmil.umich.edu
francis@mirror.UUCP (Joe Francis) (11/15/89)
I own a MicroTech Nova 30. It is about 15 months old. When it was about 6 months old, it died. The MicroTech people were curteous, and my drive was repaired and returned promptly. I do not know what is required to upgrade a MicroTech drive to be IIci compatible. MicroTech has a LOT of drives floating around out there in userland. I can understand their desire not to see dozens or hundreds of those drives back for an upgrade to be compatible with a piece of hardware the drives were not warranteed to work with to begin with. (That sentence needs liposuction.) It would be nice if they could meet us halfway though. I am considering getting a IIci myself, and would like to use my Nova with it. Perhaps MicroTech could offer an upgrade for a SMALL fee??? Can you here me MicroTech???
es2j+@andrew.cmu.edu (Edward John Sabol) (11/15/89)
I have a friend who has a Nova 80 and a IIci. His drive wouldn't automount either. He got Cirrus' Silverlining installer program, and installed the Cirrus driver. It now automounts and boots perfectly. Just a suggestion...