Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!ritcv!msl5864 From: msl5864@ritcv.UUCP (Michael S. Leibow) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: SupraDrive and Supra Corp Story Message-ID: <409@ritcv.UUCP> Date: 21 Apr 88 07:13:05 GMT Reply-To: msl5864@ritcv.UUCP (Michael S. Leibow) Organization: Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY Lines: 59 Last summer I bought a 20Mb SupraDrive from Supra Corporation. I was very happy with its operation for the first 3 1/2 months. I started to get frequent read/write errors from DH0:. I thought it might be due to thermal expansion of the platters. I turned the drive off until the next morning. I reformatted it after making a backup. I restored the backup but still had read/write errors frequently. After about a week of this I called Supra. They told me to send it in. I sent it in and they replaced the hard drive, but sent me back the same interface. After about two weeks of use, the drive started to randomly reset or spin down. I called back Supra and they told me to check for a virus. I had no virus and neither did my hard drive. I don't use any public domain software unless I can compile it on my own or get it from USENET (a pretty reliable source). They consented to replace it again. They replaced the harddrive and the interface card. I have been using the thing again for about 3 weeks, and it now either has read/write errors, or loses the partition information. Upon advice from the guy from Supra, I have Grounded four pals on the daughter card of my amiga, and installed a fan that he sent me. After I made the mod to my amiga, I tried it without the hard drive but with 1 Mb (CLtd) of memory on the Expansion bus. The amiga continued to work perfectly. I then hooked up the hard drive, and it could not mount DH0. I rewrote the partition information, and the drive worked ok for about 5 minutes and then had a read/write error. I started a reformat with the map option on. The drive formatted, and then during the verication process, when the drive got to cylinder 40, 101 errors were registered. The SupraFormat program stopped and said it could not continue because of the errors. I am going to call Supra tomorrow and ask them to replace it again. From the story I have just told, what do you think the problem might be? 1) Ungrounded pals? (I still have problems and they are grounded) 2) Thermal breakdown (neat words for the damn things too hot) 3) Something else wrong with my amiga? (The expansion memory aMega from CLtd. works perfectly). 4) Maybe the guy never replaced the interface card like he said and there is somthing wrong with it. It may send flakey signals to the drive. Could have caused the random resets with drive number 2? (not number 1 or 3 though). 5) I have a curse against me that says computer equipment will work flawlessly until the warantee runs out. (My 8520's and internal floppy went bad on the 91'st day of my Amigas life. this happened before I ever owned memory or hard drives) Oh, by the way, SUPRA has been very nice to me. They only charged me for the initial repair. Even if their suggestions may have been wrong, they did replace my drive quickly twice. (and hopefully a third). I am not complaining about SUPRA and I don't think that their equipment is trashy. I think I just had bad luck. -- Michael S. Leibow UUCP: {allegra,seismo}!rochester!ritcv!msl5864 CSNET: msl5864%rit@csnet-relay.ARPA