Conference hydra::amiga_v1

I used to have a Supra and an A500. 

I'd have to give Supra a Qualified "It's OK".
   
With the qualification being this:

I used it with a borrowed DEC RZ23. Why does that make a difference?
Well, because the RZ23 is a RELIABLE drive. It's been thoroughly
tested (By DEC and Conner) to meet DEC standards which are generally
much tougher than "industry" standards.
                           
The problem with many hard disk manufacturers is that they buy CHEAP
hard disks to keep product costs down. Unfortuneatly, the saying
"You get what you pay for" *really* holds true for hard disks. And there's
alot of cheap junk out there.

My roommate just bought a 386 clone. It came with a 40M Miniscribe hard disk.
I immediatly said "Oh No!".  The second day he ended up formatting it
SEVEN times before it finally worked. 


Oh, and Supra tech support is nil. They are not very helpfull over the phone
and don't seem to be overly concerned with customers having trouble.

John

    Yeah, what .1 said...
    
    In a previous life, my work system was an A1000, with a Supra, and a
    CSA expansion box w/68020 and '881.  All the hardware except the Supra
    was rock-solid (well, as rock-solid as Amiga hardware gets).  That
    machine did suffer from a PAL problem (we discovered it when we
    installed the 020 box), but was definitely fixed.  The Supra
    experienced many of the problems that .0 described...we also had a ton
    of problems when rebuilding things for beta-1.3.  Tech Support was
    lousy, repair service was even worse (we sent the box and the drive
    back after a failure and it took 'em 90 days to turn it around :-( ).
    All-in-all, I'd say it was a "not so good" experience.
    
                             chris
    

I bought my Supra 20 meg drive used.  Perhaps I was asking for trouble- but at
$500 it seemed like a steal.  It worked reliebly for about 1.5 years.  Then,
the clocked stopped working....  I got an error when I tried to read it.   Then
I started to get intermittent "not a DOS unit" errors.  I can no longer 
reformat it.  When I ran SupraFormat with the map option ON, it works for about
an hour, but the old file structure remains on the drive!  Format did nothing!

Now, when it comes up, I get KEY CODE errors.   Which indicates that the data
is becoming corrupted.  Right?

I called tech support.  They said "Send it to us (in Oregon!), it will cost 
anywhere from $50-$300 dollars."   I haven't sent it in, because I'd rather 
spend $800 on a new drive than $300 to make this thing work again (for how 
long?).

My SUPRA drive is very noisy.  It was my first hard drive, so I didn't have
anything to compare it to.  When I saw the GVP drive in a store, I was shocked
that it didn't make any sound at all.  

Is having a hard disk for 1.5 years is worth $500?  I say NO!

	My vote is "BAD", I wish I had bought another brand.  I plan to 
avoid Supra products.

    re: .3---You got 20 MB for 18 months for $500.  Sounds like a pretty
    good deal to me.
        John Sauter

    All the evidence on Supra is not in yet for me. I bought a 45 Meg drive
    from one of their distributors at The World of Commodore.  Got it home
    and realized that athe Seagate Drive inside did not always spin up. 
    So, I called Supra, and they said to ship it back and they would fix
    it.  Well, I got it back very quickly but instead of 45 Meg from
    Seagate, ( an ST-158 I believe ), they replaced it with a Seagate 30
    Meg (St-138).  So I called them back and asked what happened to my
    other 15 MEG?  Well, the person I spoke with said that they don't use
    Seagate drives above 30 Meg, but would put in a 45 Meg Miniscribe drive
    if I shipped it back to them.  I did get them to pay the shipping costs
    through their UPS number this time, and am presently waiting to get the
    drive back. On my A1000, all the PALS are grounded and I have not seen
    any other trouble with the drive.  It would appear the GVP and Quantum
    products are a better deal and possibly more reliable.  Anyway that's
    my two cents worth for now.

    I also bought my Supra used it was a 20 Mb unit.  I stuck it on my
    A1000 and had moderate amount of problems in the beginning, due to the
    way the drive was formatted.  Reformated the drive and bought a fan
    assy from Supra themselves and installed it.  Have had very if no other
    problems at all after that.  My only problem is that their new drivers
    took up to much of the operating system and it is nearly impossible to
    do anything with the drive and 512K of memory.  Trying to talk my wife
    into letting me get more memory so that I can use the drive
    effectively.  I have talked to their support people before and I agree
    it was a royal pain but they were respondent when I sent them my floppy
    to be updated for their new O/S. 
    
    My experience would have to rate them as marginal only because I have
    read so many bad things about them.  Also I bought my A1000 in '87
    which was one of the last ones built and have not had the problems with
    the PAL.  I guess I am cautiously awaiting some catastrophic failure.
    

I've had my Supra Drive (30 MB) for over two years now and haven't 
had any trouble with it at all.  The fan is a little noisier than 
I'd like, but it doesn't seem to have lost any data, and its always
powered up fine.


Brad Davis

    I've seen an advert in the UK press for a Supra Drive 500XP, designed
    to sit alongside an A500.
    
    How do you rate this drive ?  I'm quite attracted by the fact that it
    doesn't have a fan and so shouldn't make too much noise.
    
    Any idea on prices, both UK and US ?
    
    Thanks,
    
    Dave.

    I had the drive for about 6 months.  It came with a Conner 20meg 1"
    height, 3.5 drive.  I just plugged it into the A500 expansion port and
    booted.  Supras formatting and editing software is ok.  The package
    with the drive installed is a bit noisy.(spindle noise from the drive)
    Since I had an external SCSI drive anyway, I removed the Conner and
    just used the XP as a SCSI host adapter and memory expansion.  If you
    want to install more than 2megs DRAM in the XP be prepaired to spend
    big bucks.  The XP uses 256x4 DRAM(inexpensive) up to 2meg, and 1Mx4
    DIP or ZIP above 2meg.  I was unable to find 1Mx4 DIP DRAM anywhere and
    the quoted prices were about $70.US per chip.  That is $140.00US per
    MB, if you could find a supplier for the ICs.  In order to use the more
    available ZIPs you have to buy an adapter + the ICs.  1mx4 ZIPs cost
    about $90-120US per MEG.  Since you MUST upgrade the XP in 2meg
    increments (up to 4meg), then one 4meg increment.(will not run with
    6Mb); memory upgrades are relatively expensive.
    
    The 500XP performed as advertised.  Using Diskspeedv3.1, med intensity,
    no DMA contention, and 32K buffers, it consistently tested at >580K
    reads/s.  I had no hardware problems with it.  It has a switch in the
    back to disable the drive, and dip switches to change SCSI address,
    dis/enable memory, and enable memory for testing.  It has a recepticle
    for an external power supply though I didn't need one.
    
    The only drawback(if you want to call it that) of the unit is the
    expensive route for memory expansion.  Check out the March issue of
    AmigaWorld, they do a comparison of A500 hard drives.  
    
    md