Re: While I have no love for Seagate . .

Post #3,972 by deSitter 8/6/01 5:15:02 PM Reply	Re: While I have no love for Seagate . . Could be later, but actually I thought the earliest drives were in fact Seagate - and they had an actual engineering design flaw in the positioning algorithm of the head on the tracking bar. This was done optically via black and white registration marks on the bar. After a while, magnetic dust kicked up by the head would collect on the bar and obscure one or more of the white marks. Since the positioning algorithm worked by counting white marks, a relative scheme, the firmware would lose track of the orientation of the head relative to the data tracks on the disk. A new scheme using absolute positioning was implemented almost overnight and Seagate was saved as a company. At least, that's the story I heard. We went through 3 ATs in 3 months, all with failed HDDs.
Post #3,983 by Andrew Grygus 8/6/01 9:11:40 PM Reply	Seagate may have had problems too . . . . . but CMI was IBM's primary vendor for the 20-Meg IBM PC AT hard disk, and their drives failed early and often. One of the magazines did an informal evaluation of drives for the AT. The CMI failed the "table jiggle" test. On the other hand, they accidently knocked over the table and a Priam drive on it kept on working. They reported this and Priam sold a lot of drives for a while. One drive maker promised to build an artificial reef off Florida out of CMI drives turned in for theirs (forgot who it was). They ran into trouble with the EPA, but did have some photos taken throwing CMI drives off a fishing boat. The best hard disk story from back then was Miniscribe. Miniscribe ran into hard financial times, and hired a "turnaround artist" to put the company back on its feet. Through rough treatment he actually succeeded. Then Miniscribe's board of directors made The Big Mistake(tm). They kept him on. Using his same turnaround methods, he destroyed the company. Since he fired anyone who gave him news he didn't want to hear, he got only news he wanted to hear. It wasn't true, but the perpetrator got a paycheck for another week. In the company's last audit (Price Watergate, I believe), management tried to get the auditors to consider a load of hard disks on a ship on it's way from Singapore as "shipped". The auditors wouldn't buy it, which was a good thing because neither the ship nor the drives actually existed. The final act was to make a large shipment to major distributors - but they didn't have any drives - so thay packed a brick in each box (this was the era of full hight 5" drives). I talked to an Ingram sales lady once who actually saw the boxes being unpacked in the warehouse. Well, if you're going out . . . you might as well go out a legend . . . [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #4,016 by dlevitt 8/7/01 9:31:37 AM Reply	Re: Seagate may have had problems too . . . > One drive maker promised to build an artificial reef off Florida out of CMI drives turned in for theirs > (forgot who it was). They ran into trouble with the EPA, but did have some photos taken throwing > CMI drives off a fishing boat. I think that was Emerald Systems, with their 20/20 & 30/30 drives [disk drive and matching capacity backup tape in the same box]. We used to ship them on NetWare/86 and NetWare/286 boxes. Dave Who had the first PC/AT on Long Island
Post #4,025 by DonRichards 8/7/01 10:07:19 AM Reply	I seem to remember it was the 10 meg drives The 10 Mb drives from seagate that were sold as upgrades and replaced one of the floppy drives. They were also sold with new systems (both IBM PC XT and various clone systems). It's been a long time though and my memory has holes like a swiss chees. "When it crosses my mind to do something, I don't ask why, I ask why not. And usually there's no reason not to, so I just go ahead. It's given me the strangest collection of hats"
Post #4,068 by Andrew Grygus 8/7/01 2:15:30 PM Reply	Emerald also melted down. They were popular with VARs for awhile bcause they supported Concurrent DOS. I got pissed at them because they refused to upgrade the software for their 60-Meg QIC drives to include compression. They said they'd give me a trade-in for a new drive. The trade-in "deal" was considerably more than the distributor price for the new drive. All I needed was a bit more space on what my clients already had. Then they pissed off everyone because the software for their new drives did a great job of backing up, but not such a good job of restoring. May they roast in hell along with CMI (and hopefully, eventually, Iomega). [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]

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