Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!shelby!polya!kaufman From: kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: What's wrong with Rodimes? Message-ID: <8476@polya.Stanford.EDU> Date: 15 Apr 89 16:50:05 GMT References: <911@tasis.utas.oz> <17207@cup.portal.com> Sender: Marc T. Kaufman Reply-To: kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman) Organization: Stanford University Lines: 30 In article <17207@cup.portal.com> ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) writes: >Here's my personal opinion of what drives were good and which were >not: - BAD - Rodime 70 meg ( blind transfers on the Mac II fail! ) - Sony optical ( due to firmware bugs, blind transfers - of more than 8 blocks, and non-blind of more than - 64 fail. Sony was supposed to have new firmware to - fix this. The drive had to go back before I got a - chance to see the new firmware, however. If the - new firmware fixes these problems, move this up to - the maybe list ) In fairness to the Drive manufacturers, the problem is mostly with Apple's BLIND transfer code (on ALL machines). This problem, the inability to take a delay between bytes, canNOT be solved for machines prior to the SE. It can, and should have, be solved for the SE, II, IIx, etc.,.. machines that have additional hardware support for the transfer. Having said that,-- the drives mentioned still do not work on the Mac. But maybe they would work on a PC, or a SUN, or a .... (i.e. it does not necessarily mean that these are "bad" drives in the sense of losing bits and crashing, when driven by hardware and software that really does SCSI right). Unsubstiantiated rumors exist to indicate that Apple intends to fix the problem "real soon". Marc Kaufman (kaufman@polya.stanford.edu)