bchurch@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU (Bob Church) (11/27/89)
A friend of mine has a UDC from Central Point and has had no end of trouble. Is there an alternative to this card? He has a //E and would like to continue using dumb 3 1/5 drives. Since the GS is primarily intended as a 3 1/2 or hard drive machine I was hoping that Apple had come out with something along these lines. He is using the UDC in slot 7 and the ROCKETCHIP accelerates that slot. A UNIDISK 3.5 would solve the problem but he doesn't want the added expense or slower speed involved. How about hard drives? Are there hard drives on the market which could be booted from at accelerated speeds? I realize that disk access would not be speeded up, but I'm looking for something to "buffer" the process the way my UNIDISK does. Bob Church att!bchurch!oucsace P.S. I did a little "benchmarking" with my 10mgz rocketchip the other night. I used CopyII+ to bit copy a disk at 1 mgz and at 10 mgz. It took 3 minutes and 40 seconds at slow speed and one minute 20 seconds at accelerated speed. I did not expect this much increase since bit copying is so disk intensive. There seems to be a lot more analyzing, etc going on than I'd thought.
UD041948@VM1.NODAK.EDU (Joe Carlin) (11/29/89)
One of the reasons disk access is speeded up when an accelerator is used is because there are so many large areas of memory that have to be moved around because of reading and writing data to buffers, etc, thus using several thousand, even millions of cycles. The accelerator can speed up this process incredibly. Joe