Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Seagate ST4096
Message-ID: <11944@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 22 Aug 88 18:40:06 GMT
References: <8257@cup.portal.com> <4160010@wdl1.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 53


  I am getting this info from an article on Seagate from an investment
standard, not from a stockholder's report.

In article <4160010@wdl1.UUCP> jeff@wdl1.UUCP (Jonathan J. Jefferies) writes:

| 	Now what I've told you is a mixed bag.  It seems all these
| machines are made abroad, a fact which became obvious when I scanned
| their (USM) storeroom.  My cousin who manages a computerland
| store tells me that he routinely gets bad drives in shipments 

  This is not unique to Seagate... I've had bad drives from Seagate,
Priam, Miniscribe, Tulin, etc. Half of all Core disks I've gotten have
been bad (this is joke, I have only had two ;-). Rather than believe
that everyone is making crap, I believe that the carrier may beat the
disks into failure, with some being better than others. 

| which then need to be returned to the distributor.  It was for this

  According to the article, Seagate has both on shore and offshore
plants. Seagate seems to own the offshore plants, rather than buying a
disk made offshore and putting their name on it.

| reason that he suggested that I locate a local supplier rather than
| go thru his store in El Paso.   I mention their being made abroad to
| indicate that I don't think looking for an american made product would
| be reasonable even if I thought american made would be any guarantee.

  I think that buying from a local dealer takes one more carrier out of
the loop. The term "drop ship" has several meanings...

| 	In summary I would say that when buying make sure the thing
| works.  Ask the seller to format the drive for you just as a test that
| it will work for someone.  This would have saved me several days and
| 160 miles of driving.  As a comment I notice that USM is selling thje
| Seagate ST225 (60 megs/25ms/HH) for $199.  Two of those might be a
| better deal than one 80 meg full height for $525.

  The ST225 is 20MB, about 60ms access. Hopefully they are not claiming
the figures you have.

  For information, according the _Computer Retailer News_, Seagate has
61% of unit sales and 62% of dollar sales in this country. That's more
than all others combined. I would guess that this means the OEMs find
them cost effective. I agree that they are not the most reliable drive
on the market, but they seem to have a very good reliability after
"infant mortality" when they're under warantee. Perhaps they don't ship
well.

-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me