Mail Archives: opendos/2001/02/14/16:27:11
----- Original Message -----
From: "White Dragon" <white DOT dragon AT tin DOT it>
To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 12:15 AM
Subject: Re: prob audio CD on 2nd CD-ROM with NWCDEX
> > Another example WD with their Caviar drives, used their own methods
for
> > high speed which was not compatible with other manufactures drives,
so
> > you might have problems getting various manufacures drives to work
> > together.
>
> That's true, i can't even boot my system with another drive installed
(the
> "another drive" was a quantum fireball 3.2gb udma33)... I should have
bought
> an IBM...
>
Now you have really hit a sore spot with me. I will not ever
intentionally get or sell a Quantum drive to anyone. I will never trust
that company. I'll tell you why:
Several (many?) years ago, Quantum was advertising their drives pretty
heavily in computer magazines such as Computer Shopper. I would buy
these magazines every month and of course I would see ads in them. I
would look at the specs for all the drives that were advertised. Within
a few short months Quantum drives took a quantum leap in their specs for
the same model number drives. Like their MTBF went from 30,000 hours to
a whopping 140,000 hours. Their access time dropped from 13-19ms to a
whopping 9ms (that is 9ms for ALL drives even though the specs had
originally ranged from 13ns to 18ms.) No one can ever tell me the
technology changed that fast. They were the ones that first started
cheating on their specs. They were using the on board drive buffer to
figure their access time and they did not include the head settle time
and they used some new way of determining MTBF that showed their drives
to be the best. After that every other manufacture had to start using
these inflated specs so that their drives would show to be as good as
Quantums, and they were all better except for el cheapo crap like
Conner and some other pieces of junk I can no longer remeber their brand
name. In fact I don't believe the original specs on the Quantums were
any better than cheap Conner drives until they started inflating their
specs. They also came up with other crap like their so-called "AIR LOCK"
which they claimed only they had. Most other manufactures had the same
cpapbility only they did not give it some stupid name for parking the
heads automatically!!!!! That alone was enough to tick me off and not
ever want to buy one of their drives because they lie through their
teeth. I really hit the fan when they started using a 900 number for
customer support!!!!! You had to pay them money to get help to install
their drives or format them or whatever other help you might need.
Everyone else had toll free numbers and free tech support. The best
place for that Quantum drive is the nearest garbage can.
When I worked for gateway Customer Support, we had more failures from
Quantum drives than any other brands and Gateway sold less of those
drives than any other brand. I classify Quantum with Conner junk and
would give Conner the edge because they were honest and did not charge
for customer support.
Now that I got that out of my system. You should stick to one brand of
hard drives with IDE. There are drives that are fully compatible with
one another, but you need to do research on them to find which ones are
and are not and also which models.
If you like WD drives (which are good drives) then make them all WD. If
you like Seagate, then stick with Seagate drives. If you like IBM drives
then stick with them. I have even written to drive manufactures and
asked them if such and such drive from another manufacture will be fully
compatible and even they cannot answer that question.
Pat
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