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From: hammen@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Robert J. Hammen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Hard Disc Failures
Message-ID: <3989@csd4.csd.uwm.edu>
Date: 25 Aug 89 00:52:31 GMT
References: <870284@hpcilzb.HP.COM>
Sender: news@csd4.csd.uwm.edu
Reply-To: hammen@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Robert J. Hammen)
Organization: Bulfin Printers
Lines: 79

In article <870284@hpcilzb.HP.COM> nino@hpcilzb.HP.COM (Nino Mateos) writes:
>There are clearly two different types of disc boot up failures being 
>covered in these notes recently.
>
>The first is the failure of the drive to start spinning at all.
>This is fixed by "kickstarting" or putting the Mac or drive on its face,
> or some other abnormal position. This has been explained as 
>bieng caused by the heads sticking to the surface of the media
>or a dead spot on the rotor of the drive motor. Hey, I can understand this! 
>
>The second failure still has me puzzled. This is the failure of 
>the Mac to recognize the drive after it has spun up. Turning the drive 
>(power) on and off again will (eventually) bring it back up to where the
>Mac will recognize it. The only plausable explanation for this so far has 
>been a bad EPROM on some of the older Macs. For those of us with 

I don't necessarily believe that there are two seperate failures going on
here. Most of the problem descriptions on the nets have sounded like case #1.
I don't think there's any "ROM Problem" (at least not with the Mac) that
causes the machine to not recognize the disk.

Let's give some background information on this problem. Apple has been using
essentially three vendors for its hard drives lately. It has been getting 40
MB Sony, Seagate, and Quantum drives, as well as 80 MB Quantum drives (I'm
not sure who they're using for the 20's - MiniScribe?). Quantum has been 
around for a while (we've got a Covalent ShopSystem at work running on an old
Altos with a 10 or 20 MB 5.25" full-height Quantum disk). Their Q-280 drives
became popular (primarily Jasmine's Direct Drive 80 and the Apple 80 MB) in
early '87. By fall of '87, demand for these drives was high, and there were
some problems with "stiction", where the drive did not spin up (I don't 
remember the exact details anymore). The solution was to give the disk a good
whack to unstick it (it worked!). Quantum solved those problems.

Last year, they introduced the ProDrive series, very fast 3.5" drives that
quickly replaced the older mechanism. So far, there haven't been too many
complaints, except for the drives Apple has been shipping for the last six
months (more on this in a minute).

Seagate, meanwhile, has been having a lot of quality control problems (like
the 3.5" 30MB mechanism - the plastic spacers on some drives spit out oil
(from the manufacturing process?) onto the media over time, with the end
result being bad blocks developing all over the place), and has had some
"stiction" problems with 40 MB drives that Apple used, at least in SE/30,
II, and IIx machines. This is the "recall" that has been widely publicized.
The affected drive mechanisms have a serial number in the range of 00335507
through 01023016 (the drive serial number is near the 50-pin SCSI connector).

Now we come to the seemingly endless complaints from people here on Usenet
about Apple hard drives. Note that only Apple hard drives seem to be having
problems (many third party vendors use the ProDrive mechanisms in their
drives). Someone posted about this on Compu$erve, and I read a reply from
someone who dissected his IIcx that Apple mounts those drives UPSIDE DOWN in
the machine. I don't have a IIcx - can someone verify this? Howabout the
SE/30? 

If you've had ANY problems with a recent Apple 40 or 80 MB drive, I'd appreciate
it if you could send me E-mail. Please include the following info:

Computer Type:
When purchased:
Size of Drive:
Manufacturer of Drive:
Serial # of Drive:
How long before you had problems:
General Description of Problem:

I'll pass this info on to some of the folks at MacWEEK, and maybe we'll see
some action, since it's obvious that Apple is ignoring the problem.

(BTW, the hard disk in my Lino's RIP is a Quantum ProDrive 80, sideways-mount,
and it gets beat on 18+ hours a day and has had ZERO problems...)


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