wg@cbnewsm.att.com (Bill Gieske) (11/17/90)
Does anyone have experience with Mitsubishi hard drivers, and/or with Hard Drives, a mail order outfit advertising in PC Magazine? I am purchasing a Mitsubishi MR535 drive from them, at what appears to be a very competitive price. They talked me out of a Seagate 40 Mb or 60 Mb drive, instead recommending this 65 Mb drive. One new feature noted by the sales person is that the drive uses rotary voice coil for head movement. He also noted that the rate of return on Seagate drives is high, hence another reason for recommending this drive. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks, Bill Gieske wg@cbnewsm
jcburt@ipsun.larc.nasa.gov (John Burton) (11/19/90)
In article <1990Nov16.191532.17896@cbnewsm.att.com> wg@cbnewsm.att.com (Bill Gieske) writes: > >Does anyone have experience with Mitsubishi hard drivers, and/or with >Hard Drives, a mail order outfit advertising in PC Magazine? I am >purchasing a Mitsubishi MR535 drive from them, at what appears to be >a very competitive price. They talked me out of a Seagate 40 Mb or 60 Mb >drive, instead recommending this 65 Mb drive. One new feature noted by >the sales person is that the drive uses rotary voice coil for head >movement. He also noted that the rate of return on Seagate drives is >high, hence another reason for recommending this drive. Any info would >be appreciated. > >Thanks, >Bill Gieske >wg@cbnewsm I purchased a Mitsubishi MR535 RLL format hard drive (with controller) from Hard Drives International for my true blue IBM-PC/XT. Initially I could not low-level format the disk properly. After talking with their support department, I sent the drive back. Unfortunately it turned out that the controller was bad (I found this out by having the SAME problem with the replacement disk). So the second time, I sent both the controller and the disk back, which they promptly replaced. Since that initial controller problem, I've been VERY happy with the MR535, no problems whatsoever. HDI was very helpful throughout the entire situation, and were more than happy to handle a return. The only complaints I have are the lack of an 800 tech support number (although they DIDN'T keep me on hold very long at all) and the fact that I had to pay for return shipping... As far as the drive itself, I heartily recommend it. The voice coil head actuator is a definite plus...you get automatic head parking and you don't have the thermal expansion induced head alignment problems that you get with stepper motor head acuators (stepper motor drives should be low-level formated on a regular basis, not so with voice coil) John Burton (jcburt@cs.wm.edu) (jcburt@ipsun.larc.nasa.gov)
ashing@polari.UUCP (Al Shing) (11/20/90)
In article <1990Nov16.191532.17896@cbnewsm.att.com> wg@cbnewsm.att.com (Bill Gieske) writes: > >Does anyone have experience with Mitsubishi hard drivers, and/or with >Hard Drives, a mail order outfit advertising in PC Magazine? I am >purchasing a Mitsubishi MR535 drive from them, at what appears to be >a very competitive price. They talked me out of a Seagate 40 Mb or 60 Mb >drive, instead recommending this 65 Mb drive. One new feature noted by >the sales person is that the drive uses rotary voice coil for head >movement. He also noted that the rate of return on Seagate drives is >high, hence another reason for recommending this drive. Any info would >be appreciated. My PC came with one of these drives, and after about 3 or 4 months, I started getting "Drive C: not ready" messages. During this period, I upgraded to PC Tools 6.0, MS Windows 3.0, and picked up Disk Technician to LLF my disk. Disk Technician did find a bad sector, which was not marked, but was labeled on the outside of the HD. However, DT wiped out the configuration information stored in my controller, so the next time I used it to LLF, I couldn't run FDISK. After some research, I learned how to use the controller's LLF program, which fixed the problem, but made DT pretty useless. I continued to get not ready messages, until I set VirtualHDIrq=off in Win 3. This reduced the frequency considerably, but I still get lockups when running two programs at once, or doing concurrent DMA I/O with some programs. I almost bought a second Mitsubishi MR-535, but couldn't figure out where it would go in my PC. I settled on one of those new Plus Hardcards instead, since it is 105 MB, and supposedly has 9ms access time. Al Shing