Re: Pinger INIT for Zip drives

["Barry Rees" <Barry.Rees@prodigy.net>]

Michael Hackett <at217@chebucto.ns.ca> wrote in article
<5o1n1j$d21$1@News.Dal.Ca>...

> Is this with an external? And with which SCSI card? I've never had
> that problem with my AHS/Zip (internal), and I've never heard
> anyone with an external ever mention it.
> 

I have two external Zip100 drives that I bought recently hooked (currently)
to an Apple II High Speed SCSI Card along with a Pegasus 85 MB internal
hard drive. BOTH Zip100 drives fall asleep after about 15 minutes. Usually
it is not a problem. When a program or the Finder try to access a drive,
that drive spins up quickly and the system continues on. However, once and
a while the GS calls for a disk to be inserted in the drive that's asleep
or the system just sits there. In that case I simply eject the cartridge
with the eject button and re-insert it and the system takes off. A pain,
but it works.

> Sounds like a perfectly feasible program, though. Just use a
> Heartbeat Manager (or whatever the replacement was called) task
> that fires every five or ten minutes and sends some simple
> query command to the drive. I'm afraid I can't offer to do it
> right now, nor would I be able to test it if I did, since I've
> never seen the problem described.
> 
> 
Personally, I like that the Zip100 spins down. However, it certainly would
be handy to be able to control the duration before going to sleep (or) set
it to "never" if desired.

Barry Rees
Barry.Rees@prodigy.net