Unusual drives

[Tannin]

The other day I came across a real rarity: a Conner Technology 15GB drive. No, not a Conner Peripherals drive, not the company that started when Finis Conner argued with Al Shugart and stomped off muttering that he was going to start his own drive company - which he did with considerable success for a good many years. No, the drive I saw was one from the new and short-lived Conner Technology: the company Finis Conner founded to go after the low-end market when his non-participation agreement with Seagate expired.

Alas, I needed a drive of that capacity in a hurry a little while ago and I no longer have it. But I did manage to run VSEEK on it before I let it out of the shop. No two ways about it: it was very slow. I'll dig the seek patterns out in a day or two and post them, but as I recall it, it didn't have the seek pattern weirdness of the Seagate U Series drives, but was every bit as unimpressive.

As a matter of detail, I pulled it out of an E-Machines Celeron 600.

 

[Mercutio]

You're not going to start waxing poetic about JTS or Micropolis, are you?

 

[CougTek]

Anyone of you have an opinion about JTS? I remember to have seen some of their drives ~5-6 years ago on the price lists of a few corean suppliers. I didn't trust them (not enough knowledge about their products) and I never bought anything from them.

I'd like to know what I missed.

 

[Mercutio]

JTS mainly sold drives to Compaq for use in Presario machines.
The phrase "largely supplanted by the Quantum Bigfoot" springs to my mind when I think of them.

Draw your own conclusion.

 

[jtr1962]

Anyone of you have an opinion about JTS? I remember to have seen some of their drives ~5-6 years ago on the price lists of a few corean suppliers. I didn't trust them (not enough knowledge about their products) and I never bought anything from them.

I'd like to know what I missed.

I saw many JTS drives being sold on eBay in "non-working", parts only condition. Based on this, I would say reliability was not one of this brand's strong points.

 

[Tannin]

JTS had a pretty ordinary reputation. I came along to JTS drives late in the company's life, and tried a few of their "Champion" line - mostly 2.1GB drives. These were the last remaining drive on the market to user thin-film head technology, as opposed to MR, but they were not by any means as sluggish as I expected.

In fact, they were sweet little drives: cheap, quite decent seek performance (as you can see from the VSEEK GIF above), and they proved to be decently reliable. I think one of the half-dozen (maybe it was a dozen) we sold failed fairly early on - though I may be misremembering, it might have been none: we got some other weirdo drives from the same supplier around the same time, and I certainly returned enough of them.

I think I've only seen a couple of our JTS drives since then. One we traded in and resold, the other arrived late last year with a problem and I'm damned if I can remember now if it was an actual replace-drive problem or a mere reformat and reinstall job. In any case, it had survived a local primary school for four years or so, and that's as much as I can ask of any drive.

Now compare the VSEEK graph above to that of another low-cpst 2GB drive of similar vintage: a Seagate Medalist 4500.

And this, remember, while by no means a rocketship, was clearly superior to those Bigfoot things HP used to fit. In short, yes, I remember JTS Mercutio. I remember their neat, clean styling (call me stupid but I like a good-looking drive), their quite decent reliability record, and their better than expected performance. If they had kept trading on a little longer I would have bought some more of them.

PS: some weirdness at my server right now - can't seem to FTP the images up. I'll sort them out later. I hope.

 

[Vlad The Impaler]

I saw a Bigfoot in an IBM PC only today. Shame on you IBM!!

I remember seeing several JTS drives. None of them worked, and as soon as JTS went down none of the UK distributers would honour their warranties. Nice!

 

[CougTek]

http://www.redhill.net.au/sf/JTS.gif
http://www.redhill.net.au/sf/ST33221.gif

Unfortunately, those links lead nowhere Could you correct them Tony? I'm curious.

 

[Tannin]

Sorry Coug. My FTP software was doing weird things. So I tried again at home (using Win32 software instead of the OS/2 package and fot the same stuff. Huh?

Turned out that my ISP had moved redhill.net.au to a new server and not bothered to tell me. So here I was trying to FTP into the usual ren.netconnect.com.au/users/redhill/public_html (or something) when the actual server is now accessed by a nice, simple ftp to www.redhill.net.au.

I'll fix that up shortly.

 

[Tannin]

"Shortly" - a period of time, possibly quite a long period of time. (The Tannin Dictionary.)