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From: ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Silverlining 5.1
Message-ID: <20465@cup.portal.com>
Date: 15 Jul 89 10:54:44 GMT
References: <2179@wasatch.utah.edu> <33106@apple.Apple.COM> <830@lakesys.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
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The company I work for wrote the software that one of the well known
Mac drive vendors uses.  I don't know if I am allowed to mention who
they are, but they are one of the companies that charges a lot for
their drives relative to other companies with essentially identical
hardware.

We wrote the driver and the formatter/installer program.  We tested
them.  We installed them on all our Macs.  We used them all the time
as part of our normal work.  They were fine.  We sent them off to
the drive vendor.  The software at this point was as reliable as
at least half of the competing products.

For the next several months we would hear from them every few weeks.  They
would report some minor bug and we would fix it.  I would check out
each bug on all the competing drivers ( both to see if it might be
an Apple bug and to see if anyone else made the same mistakes I did ).

All but one of the bugs they reported were present in one or more of
the other companies released software.

Finally we got all these bugs out and they started shipping their
drives with our software.  Their testing seemed to work.  They've
not sent any bug reports since they started shipping, which was
a few months ago.

Let me give an example of something that many drivers get wrong ( and
that I got wrong but was discovered in testing before the software was
released ).  SE accelerators.  Unless the driver is very defensive
at boot time, things can fail.  Worse, the way things fail can depend
on which board you have: a Radius board, for example, will cause a
different failure than that caused by a Dove board.

I think I understand now why they are able to charge a lot for their
drives: they work.  Now that I think about it, Apple's software works,
and Apple charges a lot for their drives.

Note that this is not meant to imply that the less expensive products
are not good or that they are not tested.  Rather, this is meant as
an example that there are products that are well tested.

This note should also be taken as a warning that not all Mac disk
drivers are created equal.  One of the drivers, for example, that
would not have passed the testing that my driver passed was the one
that many vendors of inexpensive disks are bundling with their drives.

Were there any inexpensive drivers that were good?  Yes.  SilverLining
was good.  I only have one complaint with it ( see below ).  I don't
recall it hitting any of the bugs that my driver hit.  If I could not
use my own driver, I would as fast as possible install SilverLining.

My one complaint is that they use their own format for the partition
information ( on the version I have; they may have changed ).  I've
got a NuBus SCSI card in my Mac II whose software wants to understand
the partitioning on the disk.  It does not know about SilverLining's
format.

					Tim Smith