Kudos to APS -- Jeff Wasilko writes:

I've had three of the new Quantum 42 MB drives on order from APS for nearly two months. After calling the sales department a number of times and getting no solid answer on when the drives would be in from Quantum, I called Paul McGraw, APS's vice-president.

I got his voice mail and left a message - imagining the worst. To my surprise, I got a message back from him on my voice mail in a few hours. He was traveling, so he said I'd have to call him on his cellular phone. When I spoke to him later that day, he said he had already spoken with the sales manager and told him to ship me two out of my three drives from a shipment of 12 they had just received.

He apologized for the problems, and explained about the delay. Apparently Quantum decided to make 80% of their drives with the IDE interface, leaving quite a few vendors vying for the other 20% (including OEMs like Apple). Additionally, Quantum has shifted their production to larger drives, making the mundane 40 MB and 80 MB drives very hard to get. As it turns out, Paul was traveling in California to meet with Quantum to try to straighten out these problems.

I had two drives on my desk the next morning. I've heard some people say some bad things about APS service, but I still feel their hearts are in the right place.

[Also see TidBITS-148 for more on this hard drive shortage. -Adam]

Information from:
Jeff Wasilko -- Jeff@digtype.airage.com