ACB-2322B-8 and ISC

[John G. De Armond]

In article <1240 at ssbn.WLK.COM> bill at ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) writes:
>
>>I have to wish you luck in getting a 2322B-8 working with ISC.  4 months
>>ago I sent my ACB-2322B-8 controller and my Maxtor 8760E drive to ISC.
>
>Lemme be sure I have this straight...  FOUR MONTHS???  I can certainly
>sympathize with ISC's predicament trying to support all things for all
>combinations and they should be grateful for your generous loan of
>cutting edge hardware, but FOUR MONTHS???  That's ungrateful, unprofessional,
>and borders (IMHO) on criminal!

I thought I'd never see the day when I'd be siding with Interactive but Bill
Kenedy, don't you think that level of hostility is a bit premature?  The 
first Bill did not indicate that he'd asked for his hardware back so I'd
hardly call it criminal.  Poor customer relations for sure, but hardly
criminal.

For all the flamage Interactive deserves (and that's a bunch), at least
they ARE on the net and do at least try to respond sometimes.  Ever
try to get a really sticky problem solved with Microsoft?  Or worse, IBM?
Harsh, but positive and fair pressure does work.  Witness the long overdue
man pages and paper docs to come with the next release.  (Which I SURE
hope does not cost as much as the hardware its running on!)  Slam 'em when
they deserve it but let's be fair.  

Besides, that's just a little horror story compared to what is still 
unfolding in my shop.

You may remember WAAAAY back in March, when Newbury Data announced a closeout
on a wide variety of disk drives as they were pulling out of the American
market.  The largest drive available was the 4380, a 380 mb drive.  Since
Newbury private labeled drives for Maxtor and since the Maxtor 4380 had a
good reputation, we decided to order some of these drives in SCSI format.

We sent 'em a cashier's check for a couple of drives and they shipped
COD! We should have taken that as a premonition.  The drive got trashed
in the return shipping and they did not insure it.  No more 4380's so
we had to pay a bit more and get the faster 4380S.  Again we send 'em a
check and again they shipped it COD!  When we finally got the drive,
it was packed in a cheap little foam space frame, suitable for nothing
more sophisticated than a floppy.  The drive had broken free of the
mount and had rattled around in the box.  

The second thing that we noticed was that the defect map covered the
whole side of the drive!  This drive was trash going in!  Newbury recommended 
that we try the drive because if it were broken, we had a 1 year warranty.  

We fired the drive up, formatted it (over 6 hours of bad sector lockout),
and installed Unix.  Fast drive.  About a week later, it started growing
bad sectors at a rate of about 5 a day.  We called Newbury.  They claimed
to be all out of these drives but that we could ship it to Daisy Disk in
Salisbury, Ma for warranty.  We explained that our company was a startup
and that we really needed the drive for our production machine.  They
promised to arrange 48 hour turnaround with Daisy.

We Fed-Ex'd the drive to Daisy.  They were supposed to ship a refurb from
stock in return.   THREE MONTHS LATER and after about 20 phone calls in which
the salesman claimed to be shipping the same day, and after assistance from the 
Federal Trade Comission, they shipped a drive back.  On my Fed-Ex account. 
The same drive.  With the original tamper seals intact.  And with the same 
PCB in place as evidenced by my hidden witness marks.

Needless to say, the drive was still broken.  And I had several hundred 
dollars worth of long distance phone bills.  My attorney advised us to
try to work with Newbury.  Which we did.  I've since made about 35 trans-
Atlantic phone calls to the UK.  Each time, they promised to ship me a 
new replacement drive that day.  I've talked to Sales, Marketing, Repair,
Customer Service, a couple of Directors and innumerable secretaries.  All
nice.  All polite.  All promised to ship a drive the same day.  Some even
gave me the name of the carrier.  But none did a damn thing.  Until last 
week.

Finally, last Friday, almost 6 months to the day, I get a call from
Atlanta Customs.  They have a disk drive at the Atlanta Airport and there
is duty due!  The SOBs shipped the drive duty-due.  I'll probably have to
pay another round of shipping too.  And I have little real hope of this one
working either.

I've built a file about an inch thick on this case.  Daisy disk in particular
deserves anything anybody can do to them.  They played a classic game of
"The three greatest lies".  I was impressed with some of the excuses they
came up with for not having shipped the drive.  Newbury?  Well, they're 
probably just illustrating again why the British Empire is spoken of in 
the past tense.

As for us, I plan to turn the file over to the FTC and the state consumer
protection office.  I don't have the funds to sue them for the damage they've
caused to the company but they deserve it.  I'd suggest that anyone 
contemplating doing business with either Daisy or Newbury to carefully 
reconsider the options.  I'd also suggest that anyone buying Maxtor disks to 
specify that they are not to ship Newbury private labeled drives. 

This network is probably the most powerful weapon we little people have
against dishonest vendors.  We must use the weapon carefully but when 
appropriate, let loose with both barrels.

John

PS:  I'd like to hear from anybody else on the net that bought Newbury
drives from that advertisement of March 15th crossposted to everywhere.
I'd like to give the FTC and the CPO all the ammunition I can.


-- 
John De Armond, WD4OQC                     | Manual? ... What manual ?!? 
Radiation Systems, Inc.     Atlanta, GA    | This is Unix, My son, You 
emory!rsiatl!jgd          **I am the NRA** | just GOTTA Know!!!