Date: Mon, 14 Aug 1995 02:38:29 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: vince@penzance.econ.yale.edu, gary@palmer.demon.co.uk, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrade to my machine Message-ID: <199508140938.CAA12601@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> In-Reply-To: <199508140326.MAA20188@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Aug 14, 95 12:56:07 pm
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> > -Vince- stands accused of saying: Ahh.. Vince said the 2nd paragraph, I said the first one, please be carefull with attributions :-) > >> Micropolis has one of the best track records in the industry for the > >> reliability of thier drives. They were the only vendor for a long time > >> to pass Auspex's reliability requirements. > > > > Hmmmm, okay but I thought Micropolis wasn't that big of a player > > in the market. Isn't Seagates reliable since they are using the > > technology they bought from CDC/Imprimus many years ago atleast on their > > WREN and Elite Drives... > > Seagate make/have made some of the very best, and some of the very worst > disks on the market. As Rod observed, their Hawk and Hawk-II drives > have proven themselves to be very good units. The Barracuda family are > actually reasonably old technology, and weighted their design tradeoffs > very heavily in favour of performance. As a consequence, they have > (possibly) excessive heat dissipation and noise characteristics, but > when they came out, there was nothing that could touch them for speed. Sums things up pretty nicely when we talk about specific drive models. I, personally, and professionally, have a problem with Seagate, and that problem is they tend to deliver more ``lemon'' models of drives than the other vendors. I often deal with cutting edge technology, and don't like getting lots of lemons when I am trying to do so. Thus, I avoid any and all Seagate drives until they have been in the field for 6 months, and then only use them when there is no price/performance alternative. Right now I will sell the Seagate Hawk series drive (the only seagate I will sell right now) due to the fact that there is no other vendor who has an effective substitute, and the fact the drive has done extremly well in the field. This is a single point at 4G bytes, and when ever I can I get folks to spend the extra money and sell the a Micropolis 3423 drive (about 20% higher in price, about the same performance, but from a vendor I have absolutely no problem at all trusing my mission critical data to.). > Micropolis have been around for a _long_ time; anyone remember the DEC RD53? > Whilst that wasn't a particularly good disk, they have a really solid > reputation, and (here at least) they offer a 5-year warranty on most of > their disks. Micropolis is not very vissible in the PC market, they are in the high end workstation/high end file server market. They have one of the best reliability records in the industry, they are also one of the oldest drive manufactures in the business, pre dating Seagate if I am not mistaken. Sure, they have made a lemon or two, but it is really hard for me to come up with specific model numbers, whilst I can rattle off a list so long of lemon seagates it is sickning. > Rod, while we're on disks; the 4G Conner looks great on price, what's > the story on it wrt performance and survivability? I had a bad run > with Conner and Quantum a while ago, but I guess it's time to try again 8) Conner is one supplier I won't touch on the disk drive market. They have been given some rave reviews, but given there target is and always has been the lowest dollar end of the market it makes me wonder where they cut the corners. I have never seen a conner disk drive used by any workstation or server manufacure, so that makes me wonder as well. And until recently you could not get a warranty longer than one year on Conner products, they had to revise this to compete, but did they revise the product, or are they just eating more cost? Conner is also very new to the scsi disk drive market, and has made a few product blunders they have had to fix with firmware upgrades (thank go the drives are field upgradeable in that respect). Given that I have _very_ long and good experiences with Quantum (who now owns DEC's drive division, which I have no problems with either) and Micropolis I see no reason to go gamble my own businesses lively hood on other suppliers. Remeber, I am not just a consumer of disk drives, I am in the business of selling them, and my company is in the highly reliability market segment, so these are risk and assesments I must make, have made, and stand by. The other drive vendor I do use is Fujitsu, and other than the Super Eagle, they have done them selves very little harm with lemon drives going to mass market (I was involved in a lot of alpha drive testing, and I know of a few that never saw a manufacturing pilot run :-)). And on one final note, the cost of a field failure is one thing for an end user, for me as a reseller that cost can be very high, not so much in shipping/RMA time/extra replacement stock/etc, but cost in loss of future sales. -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Reliable computers for FreeBSD
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