UNIXPC power supplies: LOCATED!

[Thad P Floryan]

Oskar von der Luehe comments:

	I'd like to mention to the community that I'm running a 7300 through a 
	220V/110V transformer at 50 Hz without any trouble. These supplies seem 
	to digest 50 Hz as well.

Jim Sanchez has been running his 3B1 in Brussels on a step-down transformer
also at 50Hz for some time (almost 2 years now), and all seems to be OK.

One comment for those who called Halted Specialties and DIDN'T speak to Mark
when ordering the UNIXPC power supplies (per my posting earlier this week):

the OTHER employees apparently were unaware of the nature of the power supply
and, I heard, were actually telling people NOT to buy the power supply!  I
heard this today (Friday) from Ken Meller (another member of our local UNIXPC
user group) who straightened them out!  Apparently a LOT of people are ordering
the power supplies, and everyone at Halted is now cognizant of the situation.

Oskar also comments:

	BTW: I received the WD2010 allright, Thad! Another public praise for a
	great job well done!

You're welcome!  BUT: the job still isn't completed.  As I mentioned, I've
been "away" for awhile and upon return discovered email indicating that seven
(7) of the WD2010 chips are bad, and everyone has reported the exact same
symptoms.  I'll be sending private email to those people and be working on
getting replacement chips; I'm curious as to the date code on the bad chips.

Someone recently posted the availability of WD2010A chips for around $18 from
some company.  The first WD2010 chip I got (from ACE) was a WD2010A and is
still working fine; the chips that were purchased on the WD2010-group-buy were
the WD2010B model, and these also (except for the 7 bad ones) work fine.
Anyone know the difference(s) between the "A" and "B" variants?

And, as a general comment, 7 bad chips out of 180 is a very high failure count.
That's why I'm interested in knowing the date code of the bad ones, to
determine if they're all from the same batch.  The date code is a number like
"8724", "8904", etc appearing after the "05-02" on the 3rd line of the
lettering on top of the chip.  (Yes, 180 chips were ordered on the group buy.)

Another person (locally) discovered that Seagate uses the WD2010 chip on their
disk controller cards (for 20MB HDs).  He "borrowed" the chip from the Seagate
card and it apparently works fine in the UNIXPC!

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]