Hard Drive Criteria

[JPaul]

I'm looking to purchase a new hard drive to have on hand just in case for my Kron+ . I believe I have the right info but if anyone knows more or can recommend where I can get one your help would be appreciated.

Brands: Hitachi, Seagate, Maxtor
Specs: ATA100, 7200 rpm

[PaulBusta]

Hi Paul, I sent you a PM.

[Martyn]

We recommend Seagate/Maxtor IDE (PATA) having had reliability problems with Hitachi. However, in the UK we are now experiencing difficulties in obtaining anything larger that 160gb hard drives. Most suppliers seem only to be stocking SATA which of course are incompatible with Casablanca II. This situation, we hope, may be only temporary due to exchange rate problems. Western Digital do seem to be available (I wonder why) but were originally not recommended by MS. I'm still awaiting a response from MS as to whether this recommendation remains the same. I have discovered WD hard drives installed in pre-owned machines which seem to have been working ok but I seem to remember a question of over heating. Strangely the drives seem much lighter in weight than other brands. I also noticed WD drives in some of the S4000's.

Martyn
Dalco uk

[JPaul]

Thanks, Martyn, this is a big help. I will look into Seagate/Maxtor and actually don't need anything larger than 160 gb. I recall a couple years ago trying to get a Western Digital drive to work and my Kron would not even recognize it. As recently as a few days ago tech support U.S. was not recommending W.D.

[JPaul]

I purchased the following from New Egg:
Seagate HD 160G|ST 7K 8M ATA100 ST3160815A
However, my Kron+ would not recognize it so I ended up returning it. Now I'm gun shy. Can anyone provide a link to the correct drive. I'd like at least 120 gb. 160 gb would be ideal.

BTW New Egg refunded my money and paid the return shipping - I only paid for the original shipping.

[IanPearson]

Paul
I am by no means an expert in this field, but if you read Martyn’s reply, he recommended the (PATA) type hard drive, which is the parallel version, whereas you ordered and ATA which is I think is the serial version (SATA).

This may be the reason it was not recognised. But as I said my knowledge in this area is limited.

Ian

[JPaul]

I've since contacted my dealer and he confirms that he believes I did order the correct drive. I was very careful not to order the SATA. At this point I'm baffled and have to believe that either I got a defective drive or my Kron just didn't like it for whatever reason.

[TimKennelly]

Paul,

I have to concur with your dealer that the drive you ordered would be compatible with our systems.

Now there was a recent firmware problem with Seagates (to my knowledge it involved the 500GB and terrabyte drives though) that caused them to arrive dead or soon go that way.

Regardless, it's much more likely that the issue was one where you did not have the jumpers on the drive set correctly rather than the drive be the problem.

I believe the Kron requires the jumper configuration to be set to Master and most modern drives default to CS (Cable Select).

Drives have the jumper schematics right on them, but you have to make sure you are reading the orientation and configuration correctly.

And for a Kron you have to use a SM Card with an Operating System software on it with a new drive as the burner is non-functional until the Operating System has been loaded onto it.

[JPaul]

Tim, it's possible that I made a mistake but I've installed many drives. I know the IDE 0 drive is set to master and the IDE 1 drive is set to slave. I tried to use the SM card to load OS 3.x as a starting point but got no hard drive detected. In any case, I'm running two drives that work - was just looking to purchase a backup before these drives go extinct. But, now I'm wondering about the upcoming S2000 as a replacement unit for an aging Kron.

[TimKennelly]

Well, I don't/didn't know your drive installation experience, but that is the most common problem with users failing to get new drives to work.

I do know the model you bought was compatible with our systems, although as previously mentioned it's possible you got a DOA unit.