From: sevans@andy.bgsu.edu (Stephen W. Evans)
Subject: Re: Problem with Pinnacle Micro flopticals-WARNING!
Organization: Bowling Green State University B.G., Oh.
Distribution: usa
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 07:14:15 GMT

zimerman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Jacob Ben-david Zimmerman) writes:

>  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.

This is a result of using blind writes.  Most MOST mechanisms do not 
completely support blind writes.  When you format a cartridge customize
the driver software to dissallow blind writes and to do dynamic bad block
reallocation.

>   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.  


In general it is also good to use the same drivers for all SCSI drives. I
found with my drive (A MacProducts drive) that the Apple driver would tend
to cause a conflict.  I simply reformatted all devices with FWB Lite and
no more problem.

>  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.

MOST merely stands for Magneto Optical STorage.  They are pretty much all
called that.  I suggest you get FWB or FWB Lite and reformat everything.

-Steve

Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware