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From: ephraim@wang.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Quantum Q280 on a Mac
Message-ID: <1639@wang.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 21-Nov-86 08:22:35 EST
Article-I.D.: wang.1639
Posted: Fri Nov 21 08:22:35 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Nov-86 03:00:31 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA
Lines: 22

In a recent Delphi digest, HSTARR asks for info about the
Quantum Q280.  As luck would have it, I've got one running
on a Mac Plus here at Wang.

The Q280 is a 5-1/4" half-height drive with embedded SCSI 
controller.  Nominal drive capacity is 80 megabytes.  The
SCSI support is pretty standard but:  I could not get the
drive to run with any of the Apple SCSI manager read/write
routines.  Neither normal reads/writes nor blind ones were
reliable.  The drive would *sometimes* boot, *sometimes*
run for a while, then bomb unpredictably.  The frustrating
part was that simple sequential access was perfectly
reliable, so simple test programs to check disk integrity
gave it a clean bill of health.  It only croaked on random
accesses.  The fix was to substitute my own fully synchronized
read/write routines.

Needless to say, the Q280 will be supported by the next release
of SF&I.

Ephraim Vishniac
decvax!wanginst!wang!ephraim