All the symptomes that you describe seem to be related rather to the Mo
driver (=the Extension that you throw in the Extensions Folder in the
System of the Mac) or the way the disks are formatted. I have over 5 years
of experience with optical disks but mainly 650 Mb and 1.3 Gb, and I have
seen similar symptomes with Mo drives.... but it was never the drive itself
that was responsible.
However I found on many occasions that the drivers (even the ones that come
with the drive !!!!!) were not compatible with the drive or the System
version or there was and extension conflict. I can therefore only suggest
to test different drivers and as soon as you find one that works fine with
your drive, stick to it !!!
The most reliable one that I know is the one from FWB (HDT Personal Edition
1.6.2), this works with most drives very nicely... but you'll have to buy
it if you don't got it with one of your drives.. the others (D2, etc are
all more or less reliable, and might work or not with some System
configurations).
Concerning the Fujitsu drive, the drives (mechanisms) are all the same,
they are only put in different boxes (powersupply, SCSI interface etc) by
different manufacturers. However the quality of this surroundings can vary
of course. In addition some companies add cache memory etc.. this can cause
some drivers work better with the Fujiutsu from Company A, than from B....
For your trashed disk, you should maybe give it to a specialist to recover
the data, in general on Mo disks the data is in 90% of the cases
recoverable (if you don't do anything else after the crash).
If you need more details, write me directly with the exact System Config
(version, Ram, all Extensions and Control Panels you use), the drive
manufacturer, driver version etc...
Hope that helps.. good luck
Matthias
______________________________________________________________
Matthias Haury _/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/
Flowcytometry _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
Department of Immunology _/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/
Institut Pasteur _/ _/ _/
25 rue du Dr. Roux _/_/_/ _/ _/
F - 75724 PARIS Cedex 15 INSTITUT PASTEUR PARIS
France
Tel: 33 1 40 61 31 29 Office
Tel: 33 1 45 68 85 38 Sorter
Fax: 33 1 45 68 86 39
Email: mhaury@pasteur.fr
At 8:48 13/07/95, MANN0002@mc.duke.edu wrote:
> We have been using a Fujitsu optical drive to store our flow
> data and have had one problem after another. We are
> currently on our 3rd drive in less than 1 year. The first
> drive could not be recognized by our Mac. The second drive
> was recognized by our Mac, but was always slow (something we
> didn't realize till drive number 3). It also did not always
> know when we put disks in it and we would have to eject the
> disk and replace it again and again until it was recognized.
> Finally it started trashing disks and we moved on to drive
> number 3. This drive has been working well (or at least
> significantly better than #1 and 2). This week, however,
> our current storage disk got trashed and we could not
> retrieve our data. I don't know whether the current problem
> is because of a bad disk? We haven't used many optical
> disks and I would be surprised at so many being bad. Or is
> our current drive getting out of control?
>
> Pardon my rant, but I would like some advice.
>
> Are these experiences usual, and if not can anyone suggest
> what the source(s) of our problems may be?
>
> Do optical disks vary significantly in quality from vendor
> to vendor?
>
>
> --Karen
>
> Karen Mann, MD,PhD
> Clinical Flow Cytometry
> Duke Univ Med Center
> Durham, NC 27710
>