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From: rommel@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Old IBM AT; recommend new HD -- not an ST251 !
Message-ID: <774@tuminfo1.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de>
Date: 1 Sep 89 11:44:45 GMT
References: <7555@ecsvax.UUCP> <4420@ursa-major.SPDCC.COM>
Sender: news@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de
Reply-To: rommel@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, TU Muenchen, W. Germany
Lines: 34

In article <4420@ursa-major.SPDCC.COM> eli@ursa-major.spdcc.COM (Steve Elias) writes:
>avoid the seagate 20M/30M and st251.  their performance specs
>are a bunch of crap.  the 251-1s are not true 28ms drives.
>if you don't care about access time, then check this:
>
>the 251s are known to refuse to spin up on alternate thursdays.  (randomly).
>a quick rap with a hammer usually fixes the problem!  do you want to
>trust your data to seagate?  NO!

> ... Steve Elias (eli@spdcc.com);6178906844;6178591389; {}

I wonder if you ever tested an ST-251. I used a ST-251 for over a year
before I changed to a ST-4096 because of more capacity needed. The
machine with the 251 run for about a year 5 days of week for about 3 or 4 hours
every day, sometimes more (up to 12 hours a day). Over this time I did
not have any problems with the disk (It now runs in another machine 
without any problems too).

Several performance measuring programs said it has an random access time
of about 25ms (!). With an WD-1006 the ST-251 has a data transfer rate
(at interleave 1:1) of about 400k per second with an 10Mhz AT.

I know some other people running such disks, none of them had ever
problems with an ST-251. I think there were one or two new ones, that
did not work from the beginning, but if ST-251's worked for a week, they
did never had any failures.

Of course there are disks that are better, faster ... and more expensive !!
And the most expensive disks crash somtimes too.

If you ever write an article here about harddisks again, please be
more objective.

Kai Uwe Rommel