If you are building or upgrading a
computer system yourself.
Smart shoppers shop smart!
When I am looking for a product I also shop for the best prices. I check PriceScan and PriceWatch on the Internet. I must have high quality at the best price and I must get a product that will do the job that I have in mind.
I’m not here to give you the details and data on hard drives, you can get that from manufacturers websites. What I am here to do is help you decide what hard drive is worth the money for the particular application you have in mind. What hard drive manufacturer will treat you like a respected customer by answering your questions and then stand behind their product should you need help with it.
Being a businessman myself and my wife being a programmer for 18 years now there is one thing I do understand about the business of selling a service or product. You must give your customer’s a reason to buy your service or product over another competitor’s service or product in order to do well in business. The consumer wants to know why your product or service is better so they can choose what fits their needs or desires. Occasionally the boss or “bosses” as the case may be set down to a large table and ask themselves this very same question. What can “we” provide the “computer” consumer that is better than what someone else might provide. Naturally quality, service and a fair price are the 3 basic and foremost things on the list.
My recent impressions after communicating with a Seagate representative has left me believing they have nothing to offer us that we can’t get from someone else at a much better price. I’ll continue after I explain a few things.
Being involved in video production and having a friend in the LA area who is strongly considering building a video server network for the purpose of digital editing I thought to do some research in the area of hard disk storage that might be appropriate for the task. At the same time I am also considering building a dedicated system for digital editing here in my own studio.
In previous messages to Seagate Corporation I had asked one of their representatives to tell me why I would want to buy their hard drives over some other company's hard drives such as “Maxtor.” I was only looking for an explanation as to why they believed their hard drives to be all that much better than their competitors hard drives. They have never responded to my message. I consider this to be rude to a potential customer. Would you want to leave this kind of impression on a potential customer? (And I'm not just shopping for myself, I am shopping for my friend and for people like you who come to read this message.)
A message before that the representative told me to use their on line forum to communicate with them and other users of their web site. I tried. I had to register on the system to be a user and then had to log in 3 separate times just to read one message. Does anyone really have time for that kind of frustration? If you log on one time that should be enough to get you anything you want.
After doing more research and talking to some other people about it I have gained the idea that it doesn’t really cost Seagate that much more for them to produce their hard drives. Not enough to warrant 4 times the price or more over a competitor’s hard drive. One computer professional who works with literally all kinds of hard drives tells me that while Seagate does produce one of the best hard drives on the market in many cases it isn’t worth the extra price charged for the product. Of course we are talking about SCSI hard drives.
The average computer user has no need for such an elaborate hard drive. The new Winchesters and Maxtor’s are fine products and being the owner of more than 3 Maxtor hard drives I can tell you from experience that the company has been polite and prompt in taking care of one problem I had with one of their new drives. In fact sent me a replacement hard drive before I even sent them the defective hard drive. I put the defective HD in the same box they had sent me the replacement in when I returned it to them. The replacement hard drive is in my computer and working just fine.
I do video editing on this same computer and until I made a few changes and added the new 6 gig hard drive I was not able to capture 30 frames per second, which is required for capturing and sending digital video from and to VCR’s. I honestly don’t have any problems doing digital video editing now except for the fact that I am always low on HD space. I keep the thing filled up all the time, which is why I am considering building a new dedicated digital video editing system. A pair of 50 gig SCSI hard drives would sure be fine but paying over $3,000 each for them is out of the question.
Ever notice how the price of a product falls like crazy right after you buy it? The best thing I ever did for my TV system was to buy a new DSS. I bought a new DSS system not long after they came out I gave right at $1000 for it. You can buy DSS systems for around $150 now. I bought a hand scanner to scan pictures into my computer. I gave right at $200 for it. It still works well but you can buy a good flat bed full-page scanner now for around $80 and I have two friends who actually got theirs for $10 each with rebate. So if you wait long enough the price of the computer hardware or even software will eventually come down where you can afford it.
Seagate can not warrant the price of their hard drives, they simply are not worth what they charge for them. They do not cost them all that much more to manufacture, but then I can’t get anyone at Seagate to communicate with me so I can get all the facts. What this means or says to me is that potential new customer’s is not something that Seagate is interested in. They have a market for their over priced hard drives and they are unconcerned about expanding into new areas or getting new customers. Most of their hard drives are not designed for the average PC user, they are designed for high end business systems. That’s exactly what my friend is looking for but after seeing how I got no respect from the Seagate rep I am taking my search elsewhere to find a comparable hard drive at a much lower cost and with better customer support.
Seagate Corp. gets a bad review for bad customer relations in answering hard drive questions for potential customers. Bad product support in the tape backup and software department for not supplying replacement software for lost or damaged software to support their tape backup systems. I'll have more later when I update the company reviews web page.
I would suggest that if you can get what you want from someplace else then don't get it from Seagate. For now that's the update.
Send comments to me.. at Independent Software Consultants.
..Bryon Smith
O==I==========--==========I==O
Seagate bought Conner so it no longer exists and Seagate did produce QBWIN.EXE which is a compatible system for Conner tape drives. The trouble is that if you need a copy of the software for an older tape backup system you may be on a long search. Search engines point you toward Seagate yet when you get there you can even search the Seagate site and not locate QBWIN.EXE. At least I couldn't, and this isn't the first time I have been on this search to have the very same results.
I searched all over Fort Smith, AR and found two places that had HP 3020 compatable backup drives. Both of them were computer shops and both wanted around $180-$200 for the tape drive. Office Depot and Best Buy only carried the Iomega Ditto Max tape backup system. Best Buy had the internal version of it and Office Depot had the external version of it. I needed the Internal version of the system so that's what I eventually ended up with.
The largest disk consuming files that I have which I need to backup are AVI files since I sometimes work with AVI videos. These are mostly MJPG or JPEG format since that's what my video card uses. The files are all ready compressed so trying to compress them again makes an even larger file than the originals. What this means is I need a tape backup system that can store the most amount of data on the smallest amout of space without using compression methods. This is what we call "Native" storage.
The cost of a backup tape for a 3020 tape backup is from $30-$32
The cost of a backup tape for a Iomega Ditto Max system is around the
same price. At Best Buy and Office Max in Fort Smith, AR they are
$29.95. The object is to get the most amout of native space per tape
since the prices is very close.
Tapes being the same price and about the same length. The 3020 can be reformatted to 3010 which is what I have done in the past since I could not use the 3020 format.
Native tape size
QIC 3010 = around 800 meg.
QIC 3020 = around 1.6 Gig
DittoMax = around 3.2-3.5Gig
You can buy the Ditto Max system now for around $200 with a $50 rebate which makes the system a $150 system and the most cost effective system on the market today for the average computer user.
In compressed format I can backup regular computer files up to 7 gig on one tape. Excluding AVI files I was able to backup my entire computer system on one tape. The old QIC 3010 system required 4 to 5 tapes using max compression to do the same job. Consider $30 per tape for full backup compared to $120-$150 for tapes with the QIC 3010 system. Or $90-$120 for the QIC-3020 system for the same job. Plus the fact the QIC-3020 system is going to cost you just as much if not more for the hardware.
It is my opinion your best buy at this time for one of these three systems is the Ditto Max by Iomega.
So I went to the store and saw several shelves full of video cards. I asked a man there for help and by the time he got done telling me about the different cards I was more confused than ever. In fact I was so confused that I turned around and left rather than buying one of them. They were all very expensive, most of them had upgrades to them and more complications. I went over to Sams to see what they had. There in a little glass cabinet I found a Sierra Screamin 3D card for just $99.99. Said it was easy to install and had the best graphics of any video card on the market today. It even gave a graph on the box showing how it was far better than some of the other video cards that I had just looked at that were almost twice the price. Why not? So I filled out the paper and went to get the card. There they showed me the list price on the card was $170. Sounded like I was getting a GREAT deal. They told me if it doesn't work just bring it back so I took my card home. I pulled out the directions read the installation and was SHOCKED to find out this video card was not a DirectX product, but instead had "DirectX" compatible drivers. It says under no circumstances should you install or use DirectX drivers on your computer with this video card product! OUCH! All ready this video card wasn't want I wanted. I mean I got it so I could replace the one I have so that I could have one that worked correctly with DirectX. Yet no place on the outside of that box did it say that it did not support DirectX.
Well I figured I had bought it, I had opened it, might as well see just how good it was so I put the card in my computer. To my shock when I turned it back on, the text went from white to dark red then to blue and with black text on it. It was so dark that it was all I could do to read it to find the drivers and follow the directions. After fighting with it (which is what it turned into) for a little while I turned it over to my wife. She's the official programer anyway so I let her deal with it. She knows how to read and follow directions right ? :-) We pulled the card out, put the old one back in, did some things, put the new one in and got the same exact results. The old card worked fine but the new card just would not work at all. Not in my computer it wouldn't.
We called their tech help number. Guess what? No one is there on weekends or after hours. Right when you need them they just don't seem to be there, do they? Like most people who have jobs, only have weekends to work on their computer systems and then Sierra and these other large companies decide to go home on the weekend and leave us with no support right when we need them.
I went to their web site and discovered new drivers to correct problems with the video card product. Tried to download them but their server was off line. So I used a link from that page to go to the company web site who made the card for them. Canopus. I found a huge page of problems that people were having with their Canopus video cards. They were telling people how to solve all those problems. I thought to myself, "It shouldn't have all those problems".
Another thing is this video card doesn't
use DirectX at all. It uses Canopus's own set of DirectX compatible
drivers. Now they say these drivers are faster but if you can't get
it to run at all then what difference does it make ?
We spent all the rest of the day Sunday and part of the night and I worked on it all day Monday to restore a tape backup that was two weeks old. I finally accomplished this while checking every so often for a message from Sierra. Canopus sent me a message telling me to contact Sierra but I had all ready done that. By 6 PM no message had come in so I sent my wife with the video card back to the store to return it. Sam's threw a fit, didn't want it back. Said it was a computer product and they didn't take returns on opened computer products. I guess my wife must have threatened someone's life over it because when she got home she said I was just lucky I didn't have to come get her out of jail. She had finally convinced them to take the card back.
So if you buy this Sierra Screamin' 3D card it may or may not work for you. It didn't work for me but I have no explanations as to why it didn't work or why it caused us all these problems. The main things I can warn you about here is this.
It does not support DirectX. It has "DirectX" compatible drivers that may or may not work for you. I have learned that this "compatible" business isn't always all it is cracked up to be. Like Sound Blaster compatible ? There's no substitute for the real thing. If it isn't a Sound Blaster it isn't a sound card so don't bother with it.
If you are trying to install the product after hours or on a weekend and you have problems with it, good luck because you are on your own.
If you bought it at Sams or some other discount house you may end up stuck with it after it is opened. More and more computer product stores are not standing behind these products. They get too many of them back for numerous reasons. The reasons cover such a wide range. For example, I bought the thing in the first place in an effort to get something that was compatible with DirectX but only after the box was opened did I learn this was not a "DirectX" product. This was grounds enough for me to return it. Then as a result of trying to install it anyway it wipes out my operating system.
I personally can't recommend this video card product from Sierra / Canopus but if you think you must have it, and if you plug it in and the screen goes from white, to red, to blue you had better get it out of there quick and have a professional computer technician install it for you.
Update 11-11-1997: Still no word from Sierra concerning the message I sent them.
Letter I am sending them today attached to this link.
Dear Sierra,. tells how I learned what caused the problems I had with
their video card. Could it have been a faulty mother board from Intel
?
HP printers are tough and dependable. My old 550C prints as good today as the day when I bought it. I expect it will be printing when other brands of printers break down and fail. Even so my old HP 550C only prints 300 x 300 dpi and uses a water-based ink. This is still the original LASER quality and is fine for most applications.
The HP 550C and I would assume the other HP's using the roller (flip the page over) style system can only print within .5" at the top of the page, as do many printers, but can only print about .7" of a page at the bottom. Many publisher programs set their top and bottom margins at .5". If you have a page number at the bottom of your page or try to print closer than .7" at the bottom the text below that point will not be printed.
IF YOU ARE PRINTING LOTS OF ENVELOPES THIS STYLE PRINTER IS NOT WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR!
Despite the dependability of this printer it is slow and using a roll over style (flip the page before printing) system it can and will tear an envelope to pieces.
EPSON Color Stylus II prints at 720 x 720 dpi. Not long after this printer came out, I had reason to require a high resolution printer. Because of the high cost of other high resolution printers I had to consider all the factors. I went to the store and tried all the demo units they had and, believe it or not, the Epson printed a better photo quality picture than all of the others including the HP's that I was able to test. Though the HP 880 printed a fine picture the Epson still did a better job. I have since digitized and duplicated photographs of my children using this printer and not a single person who I have shown the pictures to was able to tell it was printed by a computer printer.
DON'T RUN RIGHT OUT AND BUY AN EPSON Color Stylus II printer just yet because, though it prints very well and is perhaps the least expensive of many of the major printers being sold, it has several little draw-backs that I was not aware of until I brought it home.
The paper feed system is very cheap. It can and will grab multiple pages, drag them all into the print area and from the sounds it makes when it does this I am surprised it hasn't destroyed itself. When it does this, sometimes pages will get caught on the print head and tear them to bits inside the printer. Yes I know they say loosen the paper by bouncing it on the table before putting it in the print tray, but I am here speaking from experience - it makes very little difference. Besides that, most people leave paper in the tray for days and the longer it sets the more the paper wants to stick together. No one is going to take the paper out of the tray every single time to separate the pages. Like I said, even if you did, it will not always prevent this printer from grabbing a handful of pages and pulling them through the printer just the same. The cheap little plastic device, the lever on the right side of the print feed is designed to help prevent this problem, but it is not fool-proof and frequently does not work right. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work but you will never know when it is going to try to bite off more than it can chew. What this does is cause the user of the printer to literally hand feed the printer a sheet at a time. This is why this printer is not the one I recommend for general office use.
Printing pictures, envelopes, labels or stickers is a snap in the Epson Color Stylus II printer using 720x720 dpi, but you still need to hand feed them one at a time.
Another problem that I discovered is when printing 360x360 dpi the Epson Color Stylus II will not print colors correctly and sometimes doesn't print them at all. I consider this must be a fault of the software but as yet I have not been able to find an update set of drivers for this printer.
Because of all the problems I have experienced with this printer I reserve it only for those things that require high resolution printing and only use it when I can sit here to hand feed it.
NOTE: I have noticed the new Epson printers that follow along the lines of the Color Stylus II still use the same paper feed system. I can only warn you that if a printer uses this type paper feed you may very well experience the same problems with the new ones as I have with this one. I am going to try to locate new printer drivers for this printer and see if that helps. Because of the design of the paper feed system on this printer there is very little to prevent feeding multiple pages into the printer. The paper tray itself sometimes engages and will not release until long after the first page has entered the printer.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If you have a product and want to see your review for it on ISC please just type it up and send it to us at ISC-List@eagle-net.org