From: zimerman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Jacob Ben-david Zimmerman)
Subject: Problem with Pinnacle Micro flopticals-WARNING!
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Distribution: usa
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 01:36:00 GMT

  This message is to warn all owners of Pinnacle Micro REO-130 Floptical
drives of a potentially annoying problem, and to warn all others about
Pinnacle Micro.  As you may imagine from that last, I also have a gripe
to get off.
  About a year ago (maybe fifteen months) my company was looking for a
better solution than Syquest 44's to store large Photoshop images.  I
researched and decided on the Pinnacle Micro REO-130, a 3.5" 130-MB
floptical drive.  I called up and asked all about it, and since I had
called early in the (California) morning, I got an executive instead of
customer service.  He was very helpful, and answered about ten minutes
worth of questions cheerfully, assuring me that the machine was a
standard Mac SCSI device, to the extent that such a machine exists, and
would run on any Mac with a SCSI port.  So I bought one and stuck it on
my company's IIfx, where it ran fine for several months.  It garbages
disks occasionally, but not enough to really kick up a fuss about.
   Anyhow, about three mths ago we upgraded our studio machines to
Quadra 700's.  I transferred the REO-130 a month ago when we deinstalled
the last IIfx, only to find that it *doesn't work.*  So I called
Pinnacle.  I got a gentleman in Tech Support nameed Darcy, who after two
calls (to him; he didn't call back as he had promised) explained to me
that no, the problem was not with SYstem 7, it should work fine with
system 7.  The problem was that I had an 'early version' of the REO-130,
with a non-Sony mechanism, which was what they used now.  Fine, I said,
so what's the problem? The problem, it turned out, is that these earlier
drives (MOST mechanisms, or some such) will not work with Quadras.
Period.   When pressed, they admitted that it was because the driver
software had never been updated to handle these older machines on the
Quadra.  
  Now the bad part. It's been a month and some days since our first
conversation, and the only answer I can get from Darcy or a Mr. James
Handley, Vice Pres of Ops, is that the problem is 'on their programmer's
to-do list.'  I have three ad campaigns worth of graphics files I can't
get to, because only the Quadras have the memory and HD space to open
them, and I haven't been able to get either Darcy or James to call me
back ONCE.  I have to call them, repeatedly, to get the same story.
It's enough to make me spit.  Just to ice the cake, I was told that
there is no way to upgrade this drive to a Sony mechanism version, and
lastly, the Sony drives and the MOST drives' disks are incompatible, so
I can't just bite the bullet and buy a Sony drive to copy all the files
to. 
   Whew.  In any case, I call sucks on Pinnacle Micro, and thought some
of you might want to hear this. Thanks for your time.

-JBZimmerman!

-- 
___________           |-Oh, drat these computers. They're so naughty and
     ||               |so complex.  I could pinch them. -Marvin Martian
||   ||acob Zimmerman!+> <zimerman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> INTERNET 
 \===/                |  <zimerman@PUCC>                  BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware