Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!rutgers!mit-eddie!mintaka!spdcc!merk!alliant!eaw
From: eaw@Alliant.COM (Eric Woudenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Serial HD -> SCSI HD
Message-ID: <4283@alliant.Alliant.COM>
Date: 23 Oct 90 22:49:28 GMT
References: <1990Oct23.015930.19587@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1990Oct23.150611.5794@cs.utk.edu>
Reply-To: eaw@alliant.Alliant.COM (Eric Woudenberg)
Organization: Alliant Computer Systems, Littleton, MA
Lines: 33

(Wolfgang N. Naegeli) writes:

>(Dr Thrasher) writes:

>> I have a mac serial HD20 drive, ...
>> ... There is a board called the WSI made by PCPC that ...
>> is supposed to make it into SCSI.
>
>I have seen and worked with several of these converted HD20s. My 
>experience has been mostly negative. ...
>Unfortunately, most of these drives have not been very reliable, developing
>disk errors that required frequent reformatting, occasionally 
>irrecoverable data loss.
>After reinitialization, the drive diagnostics show no media faults or 
>other problems, but in a matter of days or weeks they can get corrupted 
>again ...

My father did this upgrade to his HD20.  While this does make it into
a true SCSI drive, the cretinous formatting software that PCPC provides
does not allow you to type in the flaws from the defect list sticker on
the side of the drive.  The *only* way it maps out bad spots is by doing
read/write excercise passes.  Needless to say, a sure loser.

I called PCPC and told them that this was not going to cut it and I needed
either (1) A real formatting program or (2) Some minimal SCSI info so
I could format it myself.  We (my father) settled on (3), sending them
$50 and the drive so that they could format it at the factory.  It worked
fine after that.

I agree with Wolfgang, at today's prices a WSI is barely worth it.  (I
bet there are some 512K mac folks who would buy an HD20 for $100).

Eric Woudenberg