🚀 go-pugleaf

I bought one of those Sequel 5400 drives, 4gig for $699 from ISN,
advertised so prominently on the WWW, and installed it in a
Micron P-133 PC.  This is the story of my experience.

I ordered the drive on Thursday, and it was delivered on Friday.
Pretty quick service.  (YMMV: they have a warehouse in Fremont,
just 15 miles from my house.) I had previously bought a modem from
ISN, and it too was delivered the next day.  The shipping charges are
reasonable, and you know exactly what they are before you commit the
order.  They confirm the order by e-mail, and send you another e-mail
when it actually ships.

I had no previous experience with SCSI installation, so it took me a few
days of manual reading before I got up the courage to install the drive.
It turned out to be pretty easy.  All you have to do is set the jumpers
for the SCSI address, and the SCSI termination, plug in the SCSI and
power cables, and off you go.

When I bought the Micron P-133, I paid $50 extra to get a full tower
case. I'm glad I did. The drive is pretty big.  It is a full height
5.25" drive.  The documentation says it weighs 6.7 pounds, but it seems
like more than that.  Anyway, there was plenty of room in the case for
the drive, and it slipped right in.  I had to remove the power supply,
and disconnect a couple of cables, which were blocking the access to
the drive bay, but the entire operation took no more than 5 minutes.
(Not counting getting the tower case cover back on.  That's the hardest
part about the whole operation.)

I've read of some people having problems with their SCSI cable reaching
the drive, but I had no such trouble.  The SCSI cable the Micron came
with was plenty long enough.  I think there is room and cable enough
to put about 3 more drives in there.  (Aside: did that $50 for the full
tower case also get me a better SCSI cable and more connectors on the
power supply?  I know it did get me a larger -- 300 vs 200 watt --
power supply.)

Next I powered it up.  The Buslogic SCSI adapter found and recognized
the drive right away.   It said it was 3828 megabytes.  Hmm.  That
is more than 4 billion bytes, but isn't 4gig in my book.  The manual
claims "formatted capacity to 4 gigabytes."  I decided that it was
close enough.  I ran BTFCONFIG, Buslogic's fconfig program, and
created 6 partitions: 1023, 511, 511, 511, 511, and 750 or so meg.
(Much of this to get around DOS FAT stupidity.)  I'm going to 
install Linux on the 1023 meg partition.  I DOS formatted the other
5 partitions and put some files on them.  No problems.

The Sequel 5400 shakes a lot.  When it's busy seeking, it's like a
washing machine.  The head assembly must be enormous.  The drive
has an inner assembly and an outer shell, with little rubber mounts
between, to control this shaking (somewhat).

After the drive has been on for a half hour or so, it becomes
very hot.  It is too hot to touch for more than about 5 seconds.
My other disk drive (a 1 gig Conner) barely gets warm.  The
manual claims "low power consumption -- 35W (100% seek mode)".
I've had it running about 2 weeks now, and have had no problems.
I guess it is designed to run hot.  The drive mounted above it is
my CDROM.  It doesn't seem noticeably hotter, and there have been
no problems with it.  With the computer's cover on, the exhaust
temperature is not noticeably hotter than before.

They claim a average latency of 5.6 ms, and an average seek time
of 12ms.  I didn't benchmark it, but these numbers seem about
right.  Hardly "Unequaled performance" as the ISN ad says,
but fairly fast.

Conclusion: probably a good deal.  Even with shipping and 7.75%
California sales tax and the less than 4gig true capacity, it
comes to 19.6 cents per megabyte.  I'm a bit worried about the
less than industry standard 90 day guarantee, and about the hot
operating temperature.  I wouldn't want to put it in anything
smaller than a full tower.   I'm happy with the Micron -- the
case, cable, power supply and SCSI adapter all handled the addition
in fine fashion.
-- 
John Oswalt		jao@netcom.com	or  jao@megatest.com