>> after I got burned on the
>> Jasmine/Rodime fiasco
>Don't think I ever heard about that - might be before my time. Care to
>elaborate?
Once upon a time, back in the early Mac days... there was a drive
manufacturer called Jasmine. They made about the best damn drives money
could buy. Every time there was a review of drives, Jasmine came out on
top. And their prices were good as well.
Well, Jasmine, like most external drive makers, didn't actually made the
drives inside their boxes, they bought from other makers, stuck them in
pretty cases, wrote formatting/partitioning software, and sold them under
their name.
Jasmine bought internals from a number of companies, Quantum, Segate,
Rodime, and others.
Well, one day, Rodime shipped Jasmine an entire lot of defective drives
(and not a small lot, like thousands and thousands of them). Jasmine,
sold these off, after packing them up, and doing their basic burn in. But
the defects wouldn't show up until the drives had been run for some
time... then Kapow... drive would die. Of course, this would happen about
60 days into good use, right before the 90 day warrenty expired.
Suddenly Jasmine found themselves with many an angry customer, wanting a
warrenty repair on their drive. More than they could afford to handle. So
they tried to push the problem off on Rodime (after all, it was their
drive that died), but Rodime denied responsibility, saying Jasmine bought
the drives, and it was their problem to test them, and make sure they
were good.
So Jasmine naturally folded under the massive costs of warrenty repair,
leaving everyone (myself included) with a dead drive, and no way to get
it fixed.
Two good things came of this... 1: Rodime folded not long after because
of similar problems (from what I understand at least, I know they closed,
and I know they had a massive run of drives they sold to the public go
out while under warrenty). So they pretty much got their just dues.
2: A few of the Jasmine techs got together and formed a company, that was
one of the first in a soon to grow industry of Data Recovery services of
hard drives. They formed the company "Drive Savers" which advertises to
this day in the back of most Mac magazines.
So after that, I decided that it wasn't worth spending extra money on the
best reviewed drive, because even the best reviewed could die and cost
you big bucks. I paid $400 on an 80 MB external drive, and was able to
use it for about 45 days before it died the first time. I was able to get
it going again, and in the end, I got about 8 or 9 months of use of it,
before I got sick of it crashing and taking all my data with it. I then
replaced the inner drive with a 100 MB Quantum that I paid another $400
for, and used that for a few years, until I replaced it with a 1 gig
Quantum (for another $400). Today the lower half of my Jasmine drive
case, with its power supply and SCSI connectors, powers my SCSI CD burner
that sits loose on top after the power brick for its case died. (and the
final 1 g Quantum drive is dead too, stopped spinning up, from the sounds
of it, I think it suffered from "sticktion" after having run non stop for
a few years, and then being shut off and stored for a few more, the 100
MB Quantum I still have somewhere, and the 80 MB Rodime/Jasmine that was
the original, made a very nice wind chime).
-chris
<
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Received on Wed Aug 21 2002 - 13:25:00 BST