Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!sumax!polari!ashing
From: ashing@polari.UUCP (Al Shing)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: Mitsubishi hard disk
Keywords: hard disk
Message-ID: <2770@polari.UUCP>
Date: 20 Nov 90 04:08:00 GMT
References: <1990Nov16.191532.17896@cbnewsm.att.com>
Distribution: usa
Organization: Seattle Online Public Unix (206) 328-4944
Lines: 33

In article <1990Nov16.191532.17896@cbnewsm.att.com> wg@cbnewsm.att.com (Bill Gieske) writes:
>
>Does anyone have experience with Mitsubishi hard drivers, and/or with 
>Hard Drives, a mail order outfit advertising in PC Magazine?  I am 
>purchasing a Mitsubishi MR535 drive from them, at what appears to be
>a very competitive price.  They talked me out of a Seagate 40 Mb or 60 Mb
>drive, instead recommending this 65 Mb drive.  One new feature noted by
>the sales person is that the drive uses rotary voice coil for head
>movement.  He also noted that the rate of return on Seagate drives is
>high, hence another reason for recommending this drive.  Any info would
>be appreciated.

My PC came with one of these drives, and after about 3 or 4 months, I started
getting "Drive C: not ready" messages.  

During this period, I upgraded to PC Tools 6.0, MS Windows 3.0, and picked up
Disk Technician to LLF my disk.  

Disk Technician did find a bad sector, which was not marked, but was labeled
on the outside of the HD.  However, DT wiped out the configuration information
stored in my controller, so the next time I used it to LLF, I couldn't run
FDISK.  After some research, I learned how to use the controller's LLF program,
which fixed the problem, but made DT pretty useless.

I continued to get not ready messages, until I set VirtualHDIrq=off in Win 3.
This reduced the frequency considerably, but I still get lockups when running
two programs at once, or doing concurrent DMA I/O with some programs.

I almost bought a second Mitsubishi MR-535, but couldn't figure out where it
would go in my PC.  I settled on one of those new Plus Hardcards instead,
since it is 105 MB, and supposedly has 9ms access time.

   Al Shing