jbh@trsvax.UUCP (08/09/89)
Personally, I have had very good experiences with 3.5 drives. I just checked the 3.5 (Sony?) in my Tandy 3000HD (286,10Mhz). A 'dir a:\' on a disk containing 37 files completed in about 3 seconds; copying a 16k file from the 3.5 to the hard disk took just under 3 seconds. A Toshiba 3.5 on my Dell 310 (386,20Mhz) seems to perform just as well. Using Fastback 2.0 to perform backups/restores to a Priam 150M ESDI, there are times when the HD cannot keep up with the floppy! This happens when LOTS of small files are being restored to HD, so the buffers are filled by the floppy, and the HD must create each file. In summary, I am very happy with 3.5 performance, and love the durability and reliability 3.5 gives me.
kramer@bionette.cgrb.orst.edu (Jack Kramer -- Biochem) (08/11/89)
In article <216100118@trsvax> jbh@trsvax.UUCP writes: > > Personally, I have had very good experiences with 3.5 drives. I just > checked the 3.5 (Sony?) in my Tandy 3000HD (286,10Mhz). A 'dir a:\' on a > disk containing 37 files completed in about 3 seconds; copying a 16k file > from the 3.5 to the hard disk took just under 3 seconds. A Toshiba 3.5 on > my Dell 310 (386,20Mhz) seems to perform just as well. > Using Fastback 2.0 to perform backups/restores to a Priam 150M ESDI, there > are times when the HD cannot keep up with the floppy! This happens when > LOTS of small files are being restored to HD, so the buffers are filled by > the floppy, and the HD must create each file. > In summary, I am very happy with 3.5 performance, and love the durability > and reliability 3.5 gives me. I have not had as good an experience. After several tests the Toshiba 3.5 takes just about 40-50% longer to read and write than a 1.2 Mb floppy. This was tried on several different controllers so I don't think it was the BIOS ROM code. Incidently, I do like the Toshiba drive for another reason. The configuration switches allow the drive to ignore the drive speed indicator hole on the disks. I can use the 720K (1 Mb) disks at 1.44 Mb saving several dollars per disk. I have not seen this on any of the other drives I have worked on. Many hundreds of the less expensive disks have been used at the higher density over the past year without one glitch.