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Technology Stocks : SYQUEST -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Stempson who wrote (5721)	3/1/1998 2:11:00 PM
From: Michael Coley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7685

RE: SparQ Quality Concerns? Dale, You bring up some going points: >> The product is still new with only a relatively small quantity having shipped, and time will tell if there's any reason to be concerned about quality. << It's true that there have been very few shipped (I'm guessing less than 100,000 to date) in the three months since SparQ was introduced. But the preliminary reports are in, and it certainly doesn't look good for SparQ. If you search Usenet for "SparQ", you'll find about 1700 messages. Many of those are about mechanical problems. Here are some comments from "alt.syquest": "just had another cart go bad on me again today." "whenever the comp is switched on and the SparQ cart is inside, every now and then, a strange noise, which lasts probably for 5 to 6 seconds, will come out from the SparQ" "YUP, I get the same noise, mine sounds like a spinning sound and plastic rubbing in the same quarter (area) of the disk or something. About 5-6 seconds too." "When I purchased my internal IDE SparQ, I could hear something inside rattling when I tilted it - kinda like something was loose in there. I didn't think much of it, dismissing it as something to do with the eject mechanism or sumpin'. ... yesterday, it stopped accepting disks. The drive would take in a disk, spin for about a minute, the green light blinked, then it spat out my disk. " "this is the third out of the four carts i have that got messed up." From other Usenet groups (mostly comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage): "A few weeks ago, I bought an external parallel port SparQ drive. It did not work properly from the start (the drive spun up but it kept clicking and whining rather than reading disks)." "My sparq was ok for about a week now it does not eject fully. It unlocks the disk and makes a clunk. I have to push and pop the disk out manually. Any ideas?" "Ive read this group before I bought it thinking that it was just a greater number reporting problems. BUT I must warn anyone thinking about buying a sparq they are more trouble than they are worth." "After 3 days of use, the drive is now spitting cartridges in my face. Very annoying, since I thought it was working fine after I did a bunch of file copy tests for the first few days and everything appeared flawless. I am now waiting for Syquest to send me the paperwork for a replacement." "At least yours works. I received my replacement today and it is bad also. It just keeps ejecting the cartridge....I am now trying to get a full refund.." "Geez, it hasn't even been a week and my drive is dead. ... This was working fine until tonight. It appears the disk utterly spun down, and hung my computer. I had to hard-reset the computer and hoped for the best. When the computer powered up again, the drive was not detected by the BIOS, instead the drive spun up and started making a really nasty rattling noise." Dozens more where those came from... I only had to read about the first 50 messages to get this much. - Michael Coley - wwol.com