gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) (11/12/90)
In article <9011112226.AA29980@apple.com> $CSD211@LSUVM.BITNET (Mark Orr) writes: >Has anyone had any experience with Seagate drives? Any good (reliability >wise) ??? How easy are they to interface (i.e. are they SCSI or will you >have to hunt for some obscure controller board) ??? A random poll of the net like this is not an accurate way to determine product reliability. For one thing, you're much more likely to hear from the few people who have had problems than from the far greater number who have had no problem. People posting personal anecdotes concerning their experiences with the product will just waste network bandwidth. Seagate model numbers of the form STxxxN designate drives with embedded SCSI interfaces. For example, ST296N is an 80MB SCSI drive. The "N" is crucial. All SCSI peripherals seem to use 50-pin PCB header-style connectors, which mate with crimp-on 50-contact ribbon cable connectors. They also come with posts that can be jumpered for SCSI device priority and sometimes parity-check enable. Normally they also have SCSI bus terminating resistor packs that can be removed if the device will not be on the end of the SCI bus, or will use external termination (a la Apple's recommended SCSI cable system).