scasterg@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Stuart M Castergine) (04/04/91)
I've got a problem with Desktop Manager and certain Quantum 170 disks we have that were bought from MacLand. On all our other disks, Desktop Manager runs with no problem. I first noticed the problem on one Mac that was running with one of the MacLand Quantums and a GCC FX/80 (also Quantum mechanism). Copying a file to the GCC form any source (floppy, other HD, filserver, etc.) proceeds at a normal pace. However, when you try to copy from any source to the MacLand Quantum, the drive starts out OK then goes through this series of fast, stuttering disk accesses. It does this several times throughout the copy, which makes the copy take more than twice as long as the same copy to the GCC. But the problem goes away when you don't use DeskTop Manager! Without DM, copies to the MacLand Quantum are marginally _faster_ than copies to the GCC. Went so far as to reformat the MacLand Quantum. It didn't help. Then I tried the same thing on another MacLand Quantum 170 on another Mac running Desktop Manager (a different copy of DM) and got the _same_problem_. I haven't gone and tried this with all of the MacLand hard drives yet. Mostly because there are about seven of them and it is boring. :-) Since the problem only occurs on this brand of hard disk, and formatting the disk doesn't help, I am beginning to suspect the driver. These disks were formatted with the software MacLand included with the drive, called Smart Format (which isn't all that smart). Could a badly written driver be causing the problems I am experiencing? Given the quality of the other software that was bundled with the drive, I would not be surprised. Quick Flame: I don't have any high praise for MacLand; they haven't been teriible, but they have been unimpressive. I don't want to go on and on about it, but these drives were bought from MacLand without my knowledge through a third party consultant who later went out of business. They are unserialized and I lack any way of proving to MacLand that I am deserving of their rather lackluster support. I've got a copy of SilverLining on order. Perhaps it will fix the problem? I was going to get it anyway, since we have dozens of Macs and I thought it was about time to get all of them running the same driver software, just so I didn't have to go running around with umpteen different HD management programs. (What? It's a Dataframe? I thought it was a Rodime. Oh, the Rodime's upstairs. What's the newest version of Dataframe Manager? 4.1? You get the picture.)