Conference hydra::amiga_v1

1055.0. "C Ltd Hard Drive" by HYSTER::DEARBORN (Trouvez Mieux) Mon Jan 11 1988 12:29

    Well, I've had my C Ltd. 33 Meg hard disk for about a week.  It's
    going back to the manufacturer today, after a week of frustration,
    to be repaired.
    
    Here's the story:  I carefully unpacked the drive and SCSI interface.
    It's a nice clean design with a pass-thru for the connector and
    for the SCSI, allowing other SCSI devices to be daisy-chained.
    
    Alas, the documentation is on a disk.  No other instructions.  I
    boot the Amiga, without hooking up the hard disk, using my normal
    Workbench.  I try to open the documents on the documentation disk,
    only to find that I need a program called "More" to read them. 
    Guess where the program is?  That's right, on the hard disk.  Well
    after a lot of fiddling around, I printed out the manual.  It was
    VERY long and burned up a lot of paper.  It is also very poorly
    written.
    
    I finally get the drive up and running.  Half of it is filled with
    'useful' public domain programs.  The only problem is that most
    of them make the system crash, by only opening their drawers.  Sounds
    like some kind of disk error.  Time to re-format.  Goodbye programs.
    
    I also wanted to partition the drive, but the documentation was
    terrible in this regard.  I was on the phone daily, all last week
    with the manufacturer.  They were very helpful in figuring out what
    to do.  Had I not been familiar with the Amiga, (having owned it
    for 2 years) I would have been totally baffled and very p*ssed off
    by such an expensive product, being so poorly set up for the naive
    user.
    
    After a week of this, I finally go the drive partitioned right,
    formatted right, etc.  And then...all of a sudden, the computer
    acts like someone plugged it into 24 volts.  Everything gets REALLY
    slow.  The pointer, opening window, disk access, everything.
    Disconnect the SCSI, everything comes back from the almost-dead.
    Plug it back in and we're back in suspended animation (quite literally,
    I was running Videoscape 3D at the time).
    
    The manufacturer recommended some changes in my mountlist...something
    I was getting VERY familiar with editing.  No change.  So now it
    all goes back to them, while they try to figure out what's wrong.
    
    Bottom line, so far:  It's a nice drive.  It looks good.  It's fast.
    Support has been good so far.  However, if you buy one and expect
    to get it running the way you want it, the day you bought it, forget
    it.  This is very surprising for a company that claims that they
    have been selling these drives for two years.
    
    Oh well, I'll let you know what happens.
    
    By the way, I partitioned the drive into 3 10meg partitions and
    1 hard floppy partition.
    
    Randy
    

Re .0:

	While I do not own an AMIGA (yet), your problem sounds vaguely like 
    another problem mentioned in this notes file.  Is it possible that the 
    file structure is being rebuilt?  From what I have read here, that could 
    slow your system down noticeably for up to a couple hours.  From various 
    notes, the slow down should be combined with lots of disk activity.  If 
    that is the problem, it should fix itself if left to do its thing.

    No, according to the manufacturer, it has something to do with
    'interrupts.'  The problem happens even if the hard drive is turned
    off, and not mounted.  It acts as if someone has reset the clock
    rate to a much lower figure.
    
    I shipped the drive off today.