Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cs.yale.edu!blenko-tom From: blenko-tom@cs.yale.edu (Tom Blenko) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware Subject: Re: Syquest Removables: Good or Bad? Message-ID: <26932@cs.yale.edu> Date: 26 Oct 90 03:16:25 GMT References: <98@genco.uucp> Sender: news@cs.yale.edu Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept., New Haven, CT 06520-2158 Lines: 40 Nntp-Posting-Host: morphism.systemsz.cs.yale.edu Originator: blenko@morphism.CS.Yale.Edu In article <98@genco.uucp> rad@genco. (Bob Daniel) writes: |In article rc3h+@andrew.cmu.edu (Ross Ward Comer) writes: |>I've read the comments previously posted on the net. I've also read the |>last two MacWeeks which throw some doubt on the reliability of the |>drives. What's the real truth? Are there reputable dealers of Syquest |>45M removable drives at reasonable prices out there or are all the |>drives bad? | |I've had one for 3 months which I purchased from APS. A SyQuest is a SyQuest |however no matter whom you purchase it from. The only difference is the power |supply and the formatter. I've had persistent problems with a Syquest from Microtech. All Syquests are not the same incidentally -- Microtech, for one, removes the internal SCSI termination (which adds flexibility, but one reply to an earlier complaint from me turned up someone who claims that the external terminators were causing problems for him). My experience has been that about a month after I format a cartridge, it starts showing large numbers of bad blocks (100's). Seeks sometimes make an evil grinding noise. The drive (and cartridges) have been back to Microtech three times, they claim nothing is wrong, but they did finally replace the mechanism (which hasn't fixed the problem). Since they're right down the road, I'd be happy to beat on them further, but they clearly aren't going to do anything except run the existing diagnostics and tell me nothing is wrong (they apparently have no engineering capability themselves). Every time I call, their solution is to reformat the disk -- which works for another month. I noted an interesting remark by the president of Syquest, quoted in MacWeek, that half the drives they have had returned had nothing wrong with them. I suspect that what is going on here is that their diagnostics are simply not picking up the problems. A possible reason why there hasn't been a bigger outcry is that people have learned to live with this -- the disk isn't useless, it's just a nuisance. When it works, it's fine and it's pretty fast. But I'm not happy with the disk, or Microtech, or Syquest. Tom