CompuServe Messages

Alan, Your salesman is a Dweeb and doesn't know what he's talking about. All of these drives carry a long warranty. They don't quit like the old Winchester drives did. I can't remember the last time a hard disk quit on me. Oh yeah, now I do. Last January. A Seagate ST-225 quit. Poor thing. It was 12 years old. Your salesman is just trying to move hardware. Drop him. Call Megahaus (they're in the Computer Shopper). Good people and they work with the A/V customers. I have a 2 gig Barracuda and two Micropolis A/V drives, one 2 gig the other 4 gig. The Barracuda was yanked and put into general data processing because of a known problem its has: Thermal Recalibration. Every so often, the drive has to stop data transfer and recalibrate the heads because of drift due to heat and hysteresis effect. It did stop data transfer on me once in a while like playing AVI files. I got tired of it and put Micropolises in. Micropolis has come up with a better solution and its drives minimize the effect. While this is not important to most applications, its is important when using the new PVR card or recording to CD-ROM. Both need a steady data stream to operate correctly. The Barracuda is a first generation Audio/Visual drive. The Hawk, I don't know but it sounds like a general drive, not a A/V drive. The Micropolis drives are the choice for most people including me for A/V work. Drop me a note if I can help. Bye! Mark.