info-mac@uw-beaver (02/04/85)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) The HyperDrive is by far the best hard disk we've seen for the Mac. It's connected directly to the bus so it's FAST, faster than any external drive and it allows the disk to be partitioned into several volumes so the finder doesn't slip into a coma from the shock of encountering a 10 megabyte floppy disk. Combined with the Manx Unix-like environment (csh, vi, make, grep, diff, cc), this is a very nice development system. But when I went over to GCC, I found out two problems: 1. The HyperDrive is still VERY expensive. In fact, consortium schools and developers can buy a complete Lisa 2/10 with a megabyte of RAM for the cost of *upgrading* a 128K Mac to have a HyperDrive. So a HyperDrive Mac ends up being as expensive as a 128k Mac PLUS a megabyte Lisa 2/10. The cost of the HyperDrive upgrade is $2795 if you already have a 128K Mac, $2195 if you already have a 512K Mac. Now I'm not implying that a Lisa 2/10 is anywhere near as good as a HyperDrive Mac for development (it isn't -- it's much slower, especially to boot which you do a lot when developing software), but it makes you wonder. 2. Delivery time is about a month. I went to GCC at the end of January and they told me that if I ordered a HyperDrive that day I could have it at the end of February. It seems that even with a high price they are selling more HyperDrives than they can build. This is understandable since there is no close competition to their product, not even in Apple's Lisa 2/10. But you can get 2/10's with no wait at all. I've been comparing HyperDrive Macs to Lisa 2/10's but the 2/10's are actually far inferior because: 1. Wrong aspect ratio. 2. No sound chip. 3. Extremely slow to boot (over a minute compared to HyperDrive's few seconds). 4. Can't boot directly from hard disk -- need MacWorks floppy. 5. No multiple volumes so you'll only be able to make use of a meg or two of the disk. 6. Disk connected through parallel port and so much slower than HyperDrive. 7. Lousy keyboard, huge footprint. (Lisa users please correct me if there's some way around any of these problems or if you don't think they're significant problems or if there are advantages I've missed. Also please tell me how to change the screen brightness on a MacWorks Lisa.) I don't think the 2/10's low price and quick availability are quite enough to make up for these problems. On the other hand, I don't think the HyperDrive's excellent performance is quite enough to make up for its high price and slow availability. One thing that might tip the balance in favor of the 2/10 as a development machine is Apple's Object Pascal and expandable application which are due real soon now and will run only on 2/10's at first.