Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!dayton!joe
From: joe@dayton.UUCP (Joseph P. Larson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: 2000s / 500s and hard drives -- reliability
Message-ID: <7196@dayton.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jan 90 22:13:09 GMT
Reply-To: joe@dayton.UUCP (Joseph P. Larson)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Dayton-Hudson Dept. Store Co.
Lines: 32


Dayton's is considering purchasing Amiga 2000s or 500s and adding
mega-storage for some in-store capabilities.  The systems purchased
would directly affect the customer.  Thus, reliability of the 2000
or 500 is important.  However, reliability of the disk is an absolute.
While an occassional system crash can be tolerated, loss of data can
not.  (Another proposed use for an Amiga involves less disk space, but
lots of math....  We're actually starting to *use* these things here.)

For these reasons, I'm nervous.  Disk space on our more traditional
machines (such as our NCR Towers) is substantially more expensive than
on an Amiga.  (Several thousand vs. several hundred.)  This suggests
to me that NCR is making an awful lot more on disk drives than they have
the right to or that they are making them substantially better.  I'm
more willing to believe the drives cost more because they are worth more.

Thus, I need to know -- if we had, say, 40 Amiga 2000s with good SCSI
(Quantum?) SCSI drives on them, are we going to experience more than one
disk failure a year?  (That's about the number we get with our Towers.)
How about failed 2000s?  These machines are always going to be left on,
and the disk can expect to do a fair amount of work, especially at night
when we download data from our mainframe.

Comments from those In The Know?  Does Commodore keep mean-time-between-
failure numbers?  How about the disk drive manufacturers?

Reply to me and I'll summarize.  (Let's keep down the net clutter.)

-Joe
-- 
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