🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <kludgeDIpsw9.1vD@netcom.com>,
Scott Dorsey <kludge@netcom.com> wrote:
>In article <817356593snz@longley.demon.co.uk> David@longley.demon.co.uk
>writes:
>>Why *do* Micropolis make two versions of the 4GB drive? The price 
>>difference between the two is relatively negligible, about 50UKP.
>
>Because they haven't learned how to do thermal recal properly, so as a
>result their AV drive just doesn't do any thermal recalibration at all.
>At least, this was the case for their earlier models, and I would be
>very wary of using the AV drives for long-term storage for this reason.

The reason they state is that random access performance is slower with
the AV caching scheme than it is with the non AV firmware.  AV caching
should be optimized for long sequential reads that are rarely
repeated, while non-AV use should use a more standard least recently
used caching method since some blocks will be read repeatedly by an
operating system.

The new drives like the 1991 do perform thermal recalibration; they
don't just skip it for the AV version.  As far as reliability, I had
one grow a lot of bad blocks but the other two I now have work just
fine.  The 1991AV has the highest transfer rate of all 9GB drives,
it's cheaper than the Seagate and it's not all that noisy either.

>Micropolis tech support is also lousy.  Last time I bought a product from
>those guys was 1978, and I had such nightmares with it that I swore I
>would never buy anything from them again.  I have kept to my word.

1978 was a long time ago!!  Did they even have 'voice jail' then??
Besides, how big was that drive?  10MB?  Were the platters smaller
than 12"??  I'd bet it didn't weigh less than 50 pounds either... ;-)
Seriously, that's like condemning Ford because you didn't like the
Pinto; things change in 20 years!!

My tech support experience with Micropolis was very positive.  The
dealer that I bought the drive from (APS) was so lame that their
warranty swap would have wasted 10 days of my life and finding that
out took an afternoon of pounding on a speed dialer button.  After I
knew they couldn't help me, I called Micropolis directly and they took
my credit card number and FedExed a new drive that arrived the next
day.  The cost of the swap was $50, which is essentially round trip
overnight FedEx and my problem was solved to my complete satisfaction.


Ask enough times, and you'll get one of every opinion...


Regards,

Monte McGuire - N1TBL
mcguire@world.std.com