Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!enea!kth!sics!uplog!anderss
From: anderss@uplog.se (Anders Sjolund)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MAX disk drives
Keywords: Fast & cheap
Message-ID: <321@uplog.se>
Date: 30 Oct 88 15:55:57 GMT
References: <12700@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Reply-To: anderss@uplog.UUCP (Anders Sjolund)
Organization: TeleLOGIC Uppsala AB
Lines: 35

In article <12700@duke.cs.duke.edu> lsn@romeo.cs.duke.edu (Lars S. Nyland) writes:
>
>What's the deal with MAX disk drives?
>They are advertised (in MacWeek) as 80mb drives,
>12 ms seek time, and cost $977.
>30 day money back, 2 year warranty.
>
>Anybody got anything to say about them?


They are Quantum PD80S drives. This is a highly integrated 3.5" drive, with
onboard disk cache (this is why the average seek time seems so fast). I have no
experience with the MAX product, but I've played with a bare PD80S on a Mac.
The drive is fast, silent and does not use much in the way of power. Overall
impression: a very nice drive. Since I had to give the drive up after a week,
I really can't say anything about reliability other than that the drive worked
perfectly during this time.

BTW, I modified the Apple SCSI driver/formatter utility for the PD80S. Since
the driver recognizes the Quantum Q280 which is the same size, and has the same
command set, all I had to do was change the one occurence of the string "Q280"
with "PD80s" in the formatter code to make it recognize the drive. I am not
sure if I made it use the cache, but it was fast enough.

If the driver software bundled with the MAX product is the modified Apple
utility I can understand the low price. After all, a metal bracket can't cost
that much, can it ? :-)


Happy Mac'ing / anderss@uplog.se
-- 
Real life:      Anders Sjolund                  Email:  anderss@uplog.se
Snail mail:     TeleLOGIC Uppsala AB            Phone:  +46 18 189409
                POB 1218
                S - 751 42 Uppsala, Sweden