Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ukma!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hpl-opus!hpccc!samc From: samc@hpccc.HP.COM (Samuel Chau) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: about Seagates... Message-ID: <5060052@hpccc.HP.COM> Date: 8 Feb 89 23:50:27 GMT References: <6135@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> Organization: HP Corporate Computing Center Lines: 69 >>> Wait a minute! I thought Seagate drives were supposed to be some of >>> the best. Have I been misinformed? >> >> No, you haven't. In the PC world, Seagate is about as good as you >>get. Apparently Ed Maurer up there is the one who's been >>misinformed. >>-- >> Brent Barrett ..pacbell!sactoh0!bkbarret GEMAIL: B.K.BARRETT > >Brett must have missed the 100's of messages previously in this group >about failed, no-good, worthless 225's. Seagate 225's are the only >hard drive that had a 40% DOA rate at the store I worked in, and many >of those that I told people to buy are now dead. >He must have also missed the comments in most of the latest Micro >Cornucopias, from various people telling stories of grief and lament, >based on Seagate's 225. >Many Seagate 225's have bad stepper motor controllers, which make it >difficult to read track 0 after a while. This makes a disk sort >of hard to call reliable, huh?? >Dave "mr question" McIntyre | "....say you're thinking about a plate How true! Seagate's reliability seems to show a roller-coaster effect. ST-225's are known to suffer from "track drift", where the alignment of the heads slowly drift away from the original track positions, making even freshly written sectors tough to read. This problem is apparently shared by virtually all drives that use stepper motors. Voice coil drives don't have this problem since the pre-recorded servo information allows the heads to line up precisely over a track. Even temperature sensitivity is reduced because the platters expand and contract together to minimize mis-alignment. A book on PC repairs and upgrades (quite new, the author wrote about DOS 4.0 and the 80386SX) that I bought recently made some serious suggestions against the use of stepper-motor drives. These units are almost always less than ~50 Mbytes. I would say if they must be used, then run something like Gibson Research's SpinRite every now and then to zero out the accumulated track mis-alignment. The horror stories I have heard from my friends alone regarding the ST-225 had me thoroughly convinced. On the other hand, Seagate's ST-4096 does appear to use better technology. I had the opportunity to open up one such drive which died as a result of having been dropped from a distance of several feet (I don't think any drive would have survived that treatment). The ST-4096 uses a linear voice coil and sputtered thin-film media. And at ~$530 a piece, it seems like a pretty good deal. I know of one person who has successfully squeezed almost 150 MB off of this drive by using it with the Perstor PS180 controller. This Seagate does appear to be one of reasonably good quality. Watch out for some of the older full-height Seagates, though. I've seen several ST-4051 units that refused to spin up when power is applied, unless they are given some quick jerks to move the platters off their "dead-spot". And who knows what kind of damage the surfaces might sustain with this kind of "abuse"! In case you haven't noticed, I'm into pushing MFM drives into higher capacities with Perstor and RLL controllers. Does anyone care to share similar experiences? Sorry for the long message, guys. I got a bit carried away. Sam Chau HP Cupertino samc@hpda (408) 447-0238 #include