barkeyp@silver.bacs.indiana.edu (01/14/89)
I am looking for information on the Bernoulli internal 20 meg hard drive cartriges. I know that the "Bernoulli boxes" used to be quite the rage several years ago. They *do* seem to be a very attractive product for a PC that has several different users, since the removable cartridges offer excellent security as well as the opportunity to customize one's operating environment. I would like to hear from anyone with experience with these, good or bad. Specifically, I'd like to know: (1) Are they slow? I've heard this, but I couldn't say where. (2) Are they difficult to maintain? (3) Can you boot DOS from one? Thanks in advance for any information you can give me. Patrick Barkey Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 barkey@bacs.indiana.edu WA8YVR @ WA8YVR (packet radio)
emigh@ncsugn.ncsu.edu (Ted H. Emigh) (01/20/89)
In article <36300031@silver> barkeyp@silver.bacs.indiana.edu writes: > >I am looking for information on the Bernoulli internal 20 meg >hard drive cartriges. >I would like to hear from anyone with experience with these, good >or bad. Specifically, I'd like to know: > (1) Are they slow? I've heard this, but I couldn't say where. They are about twice as slow as the old AT hard disks. Most programs that determine disk speeds will not work with a Bernoulli (e.g., Norton's SI) because it is installed with a device driver. However, I determined the speed of the disk by doing a disk test on the disks and comparing the times. For the old AT, the time was 13:44 for 21M; for the Bernoulli, the time was 23:41 for 21M (no bad sectors on either disk). I have disk caching software, so the PERFORMANCE is much better than this would indicate. The performance is worse if you are not reading or writing continuously as the heads on the Bernoulli unload after ~5 seconds of inactivity, and the next disk access is much slower. This is what convinced me to get the cache software (its bad enough waiting for overlays in Wordstar, dBASE, etc, waiting for the heads to load as well). > (2) Are they difficult to maintain? They require cleaning the heads each month -- it takes about the same length of time as cleaning the heads on a floppy. The disks will eventually wear out. We use some for backups and others to contain some of our larger programs (such as PC SAS or T3 or the various graphics packages). The program disks will wear out every year or so. We test their integrity every once in a while, which adds to the maintainence time. > (3) Can you boot DOS from one? Yes, although you have to order a special version of the Bernoulli. We have some of the unbootable ones on some machines as their only hard disk. For these, we have a boot floppy which boots the machine, then passes control on to the Bernoulli. -- Ted H. Emigh, Dept. Genetics and Statistics, NCSU, Raleigh, NC uucp: mcnc!ncsuvx!ncsugn!emigh internet: emigh@ncsugn.ncsu.edu BITNET: emigh%ncsugn@MCNC.UUCP or emigh%ncsugn@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu