Hard Disks for AT

[Paul De Bra]

In article <409 at ucrmath.UUCP> jantypas at Soft21.Riverside.CA.US (John Antypas) 
asks for advice on bying a second disk which stays within his budget.
Brian Cuthie replied to stay away from Seagate because their drives 
would be crap.

At our university many students and researchers bought AT's with Seagate     drives ST4051, ST4096 and ST251-1. None of them broke down, and not
because the systems would not be used. I have an ST 4051 for 2 years and
an ST 251-1 for one year and they work just fine (though I have more
confidence in the 4051 than the 251). My system is on 24 hours a day.

Other drives may be a lot better, I agree, but the Seagate drives offer
a lot of value for your money. So for a tight budget I would advise the      
ST 251-1. Do not buy the ST 251. The "-1" supposedly gives you a 28ms
access time. What it really means is that you get the 40ms out of the        
ST 251-1 while the ordinary ST 251 is slower. 
The track-to-track time is not very important since Unix does larger
seeks 99% of the time. (file systems do get old)

Never buy a 20Mbyte drive as second drive for Xenix (and i think also
for microport unix) because the software does not support more than
2 drives, so you can never upgrade without tossing a drive.

Paul.