Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr!tektronix!percival!parsely!agora!billsey
From: billsey@agora.UUCP (Bill Seymour)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Maxtor XT-3280S/2090
Message-ID: <1495@agora.UUCP>
Date: 28 May 89 02:22:01 GMT
References: <773@boing.UUCP:
Organization: Advanced Solutions, Hillsboro, OR
Lines: 44

From article <773@boing.UUCP:, by dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck):
: In article <0499.AA0499@lerami- ler@lerami.UUCP (Larry Rosenman) writes:
: -        I got one of Bill Seymours BIG drives, and am having trouble with
: -getting it and my 2090 to get along....
: -        What happens is i cant get the thing to format all the way
: -through... It seems to hang or FORMAT aborts with format failed, cant open
: -device.  
: -        It seems to be timing related, and I am very confused.
: -1224 cylinders of 15 tracks/cylinder, 26 sectors/track
: -SCSI
: 
: I never could get my 3280 to format with the 2090 controller. I suspected
: it was some kind of basic incompatibility since the gvp also failed.
: The progressive peripherals scsi controller board though did work. You
: might try them instead of the 2090.

	I've had a couple of other people with 2090s and no problems though.
The problem that Larry is having seems to be only during an AmigaDOS format,
not during normal access, although he may have troubles with large files
getting moved in one chunk. The only time I've seen it here was with a
drive that turned out to have a bad termination resistor pack. I replaced
the resistors and had no problems after that. I do know that the 2090a
won't boot from one of the Maxtors the first time around from a cold start,
the solution there is to warmboot after the boot fails, or leave the drive
powered on all the time... Supra has a low level format routine just about
done that handles bad block mapping well, I've got the beta formatting the
last of these Maxtors right now... It looks as if it'll take about 12 hours
for the full process.
	BTW, I had a call from the Maxtor rep last week... He got wind of
how many of these I ended up selling to Amiga users. He had been of the
opinion there just wasn't that big of a market for large drive to personal
computer users! (We ended up going through just about exactly 60 drives,
almost all of which went to Amiga owners...) It ended up that he offered
to make some new Maxtors, still with warrenty, available to me. If anyone
wants one, the price comes in at $1300 for the XT-3280S. (244M if you
count megs like Maxtor does, 1000x1000 bytes... 229M via INFO)

: Dale Luck     GfxBase/Boing, Inc.
: {uunet!cbmvax|pyramid}!amiga!boing!dale
-- 
     -Bill Seymour             ...tektronix!reed!percival!agora!billsey
                               ...tektronix!sequent.UUCP!blowpig!billsey
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