-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 G'morning, Anne...
On Wednesday 12 February 2003 02:29 am, Anne Wilson wrote: > This is making interesting reading. Do you think the Maxtor problem is > specific to later, faster drives? I've run a Maxtor and Fujitsu in tandem > for longer than I care to think about, without problems. Mandrake > configures them correctly, too, but they are both 20GB disks, so not the > latest and fastest. There actually are several different problems I've either encountered or read about: 1. If a non-Maxtor drive is on the same EIDE channel, *some* troubles may occur, especially if the Maxtor is on a UDMA high-speed cable OR if the Maxtor drive is one of the "new breed" of high-speed drives. 2. If the Maxtor is a high-speed drive, on the primary, and the other drive on the channel is a low-speed Hitachi/Toshiba/Sanyo with the strange-looking motherboard (pre-wired instead of jumpers) it won't work at all. (Fujitsu drives seem to work, so long as they are relatively modern.) 3. There is an older (pre-1999) problem relating to Maxtor drives that Steve Gibson wrote about a few years ago, that *perhaps* describes some of the technical issues we are seeing with relationship to Mandrake. His article describes a lot of the technical issues involved in drive chain recognition, which is how the problem manifests itself. > Also, is it your experience that these problems occur only between pairs of > HDDs, or do they equally occur when the slave is a cd/dvd/cd-rw? I have seen some *really* cheap CD's that wouldn't work with Maxtor, but then they were really picky about anyone else's drives, too. Most of these types of problems occurred in the late 1990's, as I haven't seen any reoccurance of the problems since. Another choice problem that is easily recognized is an early CD (Promise?) that came with the sound card on the CD-ROM drive. They only seem to run on Windoze, and even iffy at that. So, if I were to hang my derierre *really* far out into target-space, I'd suggest the following rules: 1. Whenever possible, use the same drive speeds, especially if they are going to be attached to the same cable on the same channel. If you run into problems using a Maxtor drive and another drive manufactured by another company, put them on separate channels. 2. If you're going to use any of the new Maxtor UDMA high-speed drives and an older CD-ROM, especially an early CD-ROM R/W, make sure the CD is not on the same channel as the Maxtor. You'll get all kinds of interesting interactions if they are on the same channel, at least in my experience. 3. Again, the newest Maxtor drives don't work well, if at all, with some of the older slow Toshiba/Hitachi drives that came pre-configured (a WAG ) from the factory, didn't have any jumper slots on the motherboard, and for the most part were sold through package deals. I started to add Sanyo to this list, but I just looked at my notes and there is only one model of Sanyo drive I've seen that had this problem, and that was a *long* time ago. 4. Here's one I just saw the other day: Three hard drives, one CD-ROM on a newer motherboard-provided EIDE/UDMA channel. The only way the drives spun up properly was putting the new Maxtor high-speed on the Primary Master, the Seagate high-speed on Primary Slave, the second slower Seagate on Secondary Master, and the CD-ROM, a generic Sony look-alike on Secondary Slave. The slower Seagate would work, but the entire drive chain was *slowed* dramatically once you put the slow Seagate on the Primary channel. However, if you put it with the CD-ROM in the Slave position on the second channel, *everyone*, with the exception of the CD-ROM, ran at the enhanced speeds. The guy had 120 gigabytes of space at high speeds! I remember when 20 MEG cost a fortune. <sigh> 5. Whenever possible, put the first high-speed Maxtor drives on the Primary chain as Master. They seem to like that. 8-) 6. Of course, in the same coin, some of the early Seagate EIDE slow drives refused to work with a Maxtor unless they are in the Master position. Again, there's a terribly funny piece floating around the internet about this phenomenon. And in case anyone thinks I'm bashing Maxtor drives, I'm not. I've been using Maxtor drives nearly exclusively as my personal choice for almost two decades in nearly every network machine in my office, and am *delighted* beyond words with their no-BS warrantee policies. Dave - -- Dave Laird ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) The Used Kharma Lot / The Phoenix Project Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 01/20/2003 Usenet News server: news.kharma.net Musicians Calendar and Database access: http://www.kharma.net/calendar.html An automatic & random thought For the Minute: "Don't discount flying pigs before you have good air defense." - -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+SnIeaE1ENZP1A28RAhXCAKC8I9n5XvqvweBJlfn8wXmHerz4BACgpoRz lgGwhZ6L0ZtHDSEy77+nRWc= =cuFz -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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