Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!bionet!agate!labrea!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!hi-csc!giebelhaus
From: giebelhaus@hi-csc.UUCP (Timothy R. Giebelhaus)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Can you swap drive electronics packages?
Keywords: Micropolis model 1355 170Mb winchester, drive electronics package
Message-ID: <3f0f0cea.1032a@hi-csc.UUCP>
Date: 14 Oct 88 21:39:00 GMT
References: <16692@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Reply-To: giebelhaus@hi-csc.UUCP (Timothy R. Giebelhaus)
Organization: csdd
Lines: 22

OK, I talked to a technical manager (though this is still an unofficail
piece of news).  The reason they swap out the entire unit is:

  1) Swapping the entire unit makes the hardware fix vendor
     independant.  That is, a hardware engineer does not have to 
     know who supplied the drive to service the drive; she can
     simply replace a 155 meg drive with a 155 meg drive (not 
     necessarally the same drive).

  2) Many drives would take too much time to debug.  It is much more
     efficient to send the entire drive back to the product repair
     center where it can be debugged than to debug the thing in
     the field.

There is no guarantee that the electronic which was replaced on
your disk is 100% compatible with the disk its self.  They may
be different revisions or entirely different.
-- 
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