RE: optical drives

Edberg, Jeffrey Ph.D. (EdbergJ@hss.edu)
Thu, 13 Jul 95 18:05:00 PDT

We have been using the Fujitsu optical drives from nearly a year now.
We have three BD MAC workstations with these drives (one of which is
connected to a FACScan) and every lab has their own optical disk (at least
10 are currently in circulation). One of our drives did fail after about 2
months (as evidenced by an inability to read disks that were readable in our
other drives) but the replacement has been trouble free. Our disks are
PowerUser brand, they are used nearly every day and have been trouble free.
The only problem that we have had was during the installation of one of
the drives on a MAC on which we had loaded Norton Utilities and Disk Doctor.
I don't begin to pretend to understand how these utilities load themselves,
but they do conflict with the Fujitsu setup. I would suggest removing all
programs that may load extensions during the initialization routine and then
see what happens.

Jeff Edberg
Cornell University Medical College
edbergj@hss.edu

----------
From: owner-cyto-sendout
To: Cytometry Mailing List
Subject: optical drives
Date: Thursday, July 13, 1995 8:48AM

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


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