Unusual drives

Tannin

Tannin

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Huon Valley, Tasmania
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www.redhill.net.au
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
CougTek said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.

JTS.gif


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.

ST33221.gif


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.
 
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!
 
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.
 
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