🚀 go-pugleaf

A little while back I posted asking about the Toshiba MK538FB drive. Lots  
of people responded and here is a summary.

The Toshiba MK538FB is a 3-1/2" half height drive. Capacity is 1.2gig and
access speed is 12ms. Transfer rate is 10mb/s and it has a 512k cache.
The drive comes with a 5 year warrantee.

Overall people had good things to say about this drive. In fact there
was only one serious negative, but I'll get to that in a bit.

As far as I know everyone who responded used the drive in a slab. One
poster mentioned that side of the slab was a little warm but that they
didn't have any real heat problems. Supposedly the smaller drives can
have a bit of a heat problem. This would probably be a factor if you
are installing the disk in a slab which doesn't get much ventilation.

People say it's faster than their old drives, but I suppose that
is relative.

It was mentioned several times that the drive does a noisy seek
but that they didn't mind after a day or so. It is reportedly quiet
when at idle.

One responder had a minor problem lining up the mounting screws but
managed to get it mounted using two screws instead of all four. And
One person said an external SCSI terminator is required when installing
as an internal drive.

As for the major negative report, one responder wrote about a posting
describing vibration problems with two of the drives. I seem to recall
this post, but I am confused because the header said Toshiba and the
post itself said Fujitsu (which I've heard alot of bad about). Anyway
I was unable to reach either the guy with the original problem or the
one who relayed the information to me due to bogus net connectivity.
So if you are rainman!brian@ms.uky.edu, please clear this up... Did you
have problems with Toshiba or Fujitsu?

Did I buy one? I was THIS CLOSE...
Then someone mentioned a Quantum drive in the same range. So I am going
to do the same question/response/summary thing again and then choose
between the two.

Thanks to all who responded, especially Royce Howland, Ted Shuck, John
Mastrolia, John Todd and Larry Blische. And apologies to Edmund Ronald
who wanted my old drive, cause I'm keeping it.

--
Patrick Hester   ph@pencom.com   (212) 513-7777   NeXT Mail OK   =8(\/\)