USCLM@EMUVM1.BITNET (02/28/90)
David Hulrey recently posted that he has had a greater than 50% failure rate with Seagate 4096 80 MB drives. I feel bad for him. We have had a lot of problems with the Seagate drives. The worst being the ST238 (rll) 30 mb drives. I don't have the stats available, but we have purchased over a 1000 of them and have had problems in about 1/3rd or more of them. We are using ST4053 (40 mb) and ST4096 (80 mb) drives in our Novell servers. I personally haven't had my ST4096 fail in my server (which has been running for 1.5 yrs), but I have users who have replaced a few. Overall, my experience with Seagate's MFM drives (ST225,ST4053,ST4096) is acceptable (I would like better though) and the RLL drives (ST238) well, I wouldn't recommend one to my enemy :-). Craig Myers Emory University Information Technology Division
W_CATTELL@HVRFORD.BITNET (HE'S A COMIN BACK SOON - PREPARE) (02/28/90)
Dear All;
I have been following the storey line about the 4096s. Please let me offer
some insights, derived from 5 years as a hardware technician, specializing
in microcomputer systems.
Seagate has made a great drive line...until they are pushed. They are fairly
reliable in standalone PCs, or nodes. As server mass storage, they are
horrible, as Craig and Dave can attest to. Please don't laugh when you hear
this, but Miniscribe drives have seemed to be more reliable (and cost efficient)
than most other brands. Of course there are Maxtor, Micropolis and Priam,
which, while being faster with more storage, are more expensive. I have seen
a higher than average failure rate with Maxtors.
As always, these are my opinions, based on what I have observed over the course
of time. I have not kept accurate service records with me, so these comments
are based on impressions. Thanks for listening.
Bill Cattell
W_CATTELL@HVRFORD