Re: Message for Andre Hedrick

From: Gregory Maxwell (greg@linuxpower.cx)
Date: Sun May 28 2000 - 22:20:20 EST


Thats a real shame.. I've got four of the non-wide drives, so I've not had
your experiences with firmware upgrades..

Another thing about plextor, they make you sign an NDA for info on how to
control the NSD bit/speed. Because of this, cdparanoia can't automatically
slow the drive and lock it's speed on marginal disks, which would be very
useful.

I emailed plextor USA telling that I've only bought several of their
drives (and suggested them to dozens of other people) because their
product is reasonably supported under Linux and their reliability and
performance is head and shoulders above the rest (IMHO). However, if they
don't clean up their act (open up their API), their product won't perform
optimally and will be replaced with better products as they become
available.

On 28 May 2000, Tkil wrote:

>
> Note that, at least as recently as last month, Plextor USA is not
> interested in supporting Linux in any way. Plextor Europe seems quite
> a bit more reasonable, but not all the drives sold in the USA are
> supported by that organization.
>
> Just thought people should know.
>
> Longer story:
>
> I purchased a Plextor UltraWide (40x drive with Ultra SCSI
> interface, id string "PX-40TW") a few months ago, and had some
> glitches with it, so I wanted to upgrade its firmware.
>
> I found Schilly's firmware upgrader, but I could not find the
> binary firmware to upgrade my drive; the ultrawide is not supported
> by Plextor Europe (which does publish raw binaries), and the only
> form of upgrade available from Plextor USA is a windows binary (and
> it's *not* a PKEXE archive, either, sigh.)
>
> E-mail to Plextor resulted in a response of "you should keep a
> windows machine around for upgrades".
>
> At that point, I gave up, and informed them that I would simply point
> out to the Linux community that Plextor USA has no interest in
> supporting us.
>
> Thanks for your time,
> t.
>
> ... "but i'm not bitter."
>
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