Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hpl-opus!hpnmdla!hpmwtd!joeb From: joeb@hpmwtd.HP.COM (Joe Ballantyne) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Requesting comments on Seagate Drives Message-ID: <1040002@hpmwmkt.HP.COM> Date: 9 Aug 89 22:54:12 GMT References: <1989Aug8.173244.859@aucs.uucp> Organization: HP Microwave Tech. - Santa Rosa, Ca. Lines: 38 I bought two Seagate ST-277N drives. They are 65Mbyte drives. They have both flaked out on me - one regularly and the other one only occasionally. Don't buy Seagate drives. They are slow - compared to Quantum drives, and they are cheap. And yes, you do get what you pay for. Not much. One of the drives when used with System 6.0 or earlier would crash the system if it was left idling for more than 2 minutes before data was read or written to the drive. I believe that it was returning a SCSI status code of check condition due to a seek error. Naturally the system software was incapable of dealing intelligently with this disk malfunction and crashed. System 6.02 got rid of this problem. However, Seagate claims the seek error rate of their drive to be 1 in 1 million seeks. Not in the case of this drive. If the seeks were seperated by 2 minutes in time, the error rate was more like 1 in 1. Since Apple was using Seagate drives, they may have been seeing this problem also. That is probably why they rewrote the software to retry the seek without crashing the machine - it makes the disk look like it is ok, when it is really not performing up to par. If I were buying disk drives now, I would undoubtedly get a Quantum Pro Drive. They are FAST, and with the exception of some which seem to have spin up problems, they are reliable. Joseph Ballantyne joeb@hpmwtd.HP.COM - The experiences and opinions expressed above are mine - they have nothing whatsoever to do with HP. Since HP has nothing whatsoever to do with the Mac and related hardware. (At least at my division.)