🚀 go-pugleaf

The recent posting by Chuq has prompted me into reporting about by experiences
with some drive repairs.

First some background. Except in a few cases most companies do not manufacture
their own drives. They buy them from other companies and put them in a case
with a power supply and sell them.

I have a friend who had his SuperMac XP60 die. We determined that the
drive assembly was bad. Supermac uses a separate controller and drive for
the 30 and 60 since they are using an RLL controler. Well Supermac charges
their dealers $460 to repair the XP60. The dealer may then add something
to cover his costs. The drive manufacturer was Microscience and I gave them a
call and found that they would REPLACE the drive with a refurbished unit 
for $280. He saved $180++.

I had a couple of CMS boxes go out. One was easy, the drive was okay, the power
supply had died. I was ready to send it back when somebody posted a message
about bad capacitors in CMS drives. Well, I checked and that was the problem.
The repair would have cost $80, the capacitor was $1.00. The other CMS was
definitely the disk drive. CMS wanted $350, the manufacturer, Quantum wanted
a MAXIMUM of $250. Depending on what they replaced it might be less. They 
repalced the HDA(hard disk assembly) and updated the controller. 

Scientific Micro Systems(OMTI) will repair their controller for $40. These
were used in the XP20 and 40. I don't know what the repair cost is for their
RLL controler used in the XP30 and 60. Also Boshert will repair the 
power supplies in older XP drives for $40.

So, if your drive is out of warranty it doesn't hurt to contact the drive
manufacturer. They should be able to do a better job for less. Be forewarned
that you will have to meet their criteria for payment. Some want purchase
orders, some require checks. 


Stephen Sakamoto
steph@cs.ucla.edu
UCLA Computer Science Department