wallich@wixer.metaphor.com (05/10/90)
Last week I got my Ehman Syquest 45 meg removable drive. Great price, nice drive, ok packaging, nearly worthless software. After finding that Ehman didn't wire their SCSI connectors correctly for the drive to go at the beginning of a SCSI chain, I wired up my Wren hard drive, and got the Ehman running at the end of the chain. Irritating, but nothing I'm not willing to live with. Then the software problems started. FYI I've got a MacII running 6.04. These problems also occur if I run 6.05, vanilla or with my 10 or so normal inits. My Wren drive has been running flawlessly for two years in more or less the same configuration, less the removable drive. Basically, if I am using the Ehman driver and I copy a file bigger than about 50K to or from it using the Finder, the drive sounds like it gets "lost", things whir and click for a while, and the Finder tells me that it couldn't read/write *blat* because of a disc error (I/O error is the translation for the error code). This is similar, but not quite the same, as the problems I had when I had the drive at the beginning of the SCSI chain. With the older versions of the software, the access light will often remain on after this, and lock the entire SCSI chain. I have to power cycle the drive to clear things up. I had used Disk Mgr Mac to format my Wren, but the documentation that comes with it doesn't mention removables (I haven't gotten an update since 1988), and although it works just fine on fixed drives, it doesn't support ejectable cartridges. This means, as long as I have a cartridge inserted in the drive, the software will mount it just dandy, but I cannot eject and insert another cartridge without rebooting my Mac. Not an acceptable solution. Naturally, the driver works perfectly, and I don't get any I/O errors transferring to or from the drive when using the driver DMM installs. I called Tech Support, and the nice lady there told me they were getting a lot of calls about the current version of their software, and the would send me the previous version, which seemed to work better (meaning they got less complaints, I guess). Well, they did just that (they shipped it 2nd day air, for free), and I now have the last three versions of the Syquest drivers from Ehman, and none of them work reliably. I can use other copy programs (like the facilities in DiskTop, or OnLocation) to copy whatever I like with no errors. StuffIt and Retrospect all work just fine. It's just that I cannot copy anything of reasonable size with the finder. Blech. So my current choices are to have a reliable transfer mechanism, and reboot whenever I want to insert another cartridge, or to stop using the Finder to copy files and use the Ehman drivers. I'd really like to be able to have my cake and eat it too, or I would have just bought a tape cartridge machine. Does anyone have any recommendations for what I could buy to fix this problem? The Ehman folks sounded like they wanted to help, but I'm afraid I won't be able to wait for them to get the driver re-written. I guess I could call the folks who actually wrote the drivers, but since I have three versions, none of which work reliably, I don't think I'll get satisfaction that way either. Do I need to go buy a MicroTech removable drive just so I can get some *real* software for this thing? Any assistance, mailed or posted, would be much appreciated. Ken wallich@amber.uucp wallich@metaphor.com