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.)