Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!tikal!ole!ray
From: ray@ole.UUCP (Ray Berry)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Crooked mail-order hard disk company
Summary: let the buyer beware...
Keywords: hard disk
Message-ID: <475@ole.UUCP>
Date: 16 Aug 88 23:58:17 GMT
References: <6522@megaron.arizona.edu> <211@pigs.UUCP> <677@ttrde.UUCP>
Organization: Seattle Silicon Corp., Bellevue, WA.
Lines: 38

Well, caveat emptor, as they say... But we all know that vendors will often
stretch the truth a bit in order to get maximize sales.  Particularly, with 
respect to the access time issue you raise, the defense is "that is the 
access time within a 32 MB dos partition. "  That leaves a bad taste in 
MY mouth too, but I have seen drive manufacturers doing this too (not just 
vendors).  One such is PRIAM, but there are others.  With RLL, it only
takes 17/26 as many cylinders to do 'n' megabytes so the max and average 
seeks WITHIN that range will be 1/3 less.  This would be a valid argument 
only if DOS could access 32 mB max of disk space;  I feel it is deliberately
misleading.

   There are other companies that sell drives with different model numbers,
which have the same number of heads & cyls- for example:

   Miniscribe 6085 (MFM 72 mB), 6128 (rll 109 mB ) ..same # head/cylinders
      Seagate 4096 (MFM 80 mB), 4144R (rll 120 mB ) ..same # head/cylinders
      Seagate ST251.(mfm 42.8 mB) ST277R (rll, 65 mB)   "    "       "

These drives DO differ in that the read/write electronics have been opti-
mized for the different data encoding schemes.  Media may differ, too - I
don't know for sure.

   I don't think it is fair to accuse JB of fraud here.  After all, they
may be simply printing what was on the mfr's spec sheet.  True, they didn't 
go to any trouble to clarify- but a few pointed questions would have cor-
rected your erroneous assumptions. 

   Moral of the story: don't depend on vendors to understand what you are
buying;  assumptions can be wrong.  Get spec sheets from the drive mfrs or 
their representatives for the drives you are interested in.  Look them over 
carefully.  Then you can make an informed purchase.   And minimize these
"misunderstandings" :-)
-- 
-- 
Ray Berry						KB7HT
Seattle Silicon Corp., 3075 112th Ave NE.,  Bellevue WA 98004
(206) 828 4422                    ...!uw-beaver!tikal!ole!ray
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