akl@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Rob Tillotson) (10/03/90)
Greetings...
I've been looking around my floppy collection lately, finding that it is
getting far too unwieldy. I love to collect stuff and regular old 3.5"
disks are just too small, and I have too many of them. Considering that
most of them contain infrequently used archives, I would like to find some
way of putting all this stuff on some media that is a bit more convenient,
either smaller or on fewer pieces of media (less stuff for me to lose!).
So, I am looking for some sort of removable storage that is more efficient
than a regular disk but still reasonably affordable. It doesn't have to
be fast or ultra-convenient. I have been looking at a few options, and I
would appreciate it if anyone using one of these options would send me mail
with their opinions...
My apologies for the large numbers of questions. If you have any information
or opinions on this sort of thing please send me mail - I don't have a lot
of money to spend and I want to make as informed a choice as possible...
1) The AE High-density floppy drive
Well, it's fairly inexpensive, and high density floppies are pretty
cheap. I have been wondering a few things about this drive, though. Does
it work with A-Max, either in HD mode or even just as a normal drive? Can it
read & write MS-DOS disks in HD mode with CrossDos or MSH? How fast is it
compared to a regular floppy drive? Any odd incompatibilities I should know
about?
2) VCR backup systems
The VCR backup systems I have seen on MS-DOS machines would seem to be
very appropriate to my application. Not too convenient or fast, but quite
inexpensive. Has anyone come out with such a product for the Amiga yet?
I seem to remember some discussion about such things in this group a while
back, but I didn't pay much attention at the time since I didn't need the
extra storage...
3) Tape backups
I remember someone here stating that he had a generic SCSI tape device
driver he was willing to distribute. (I seem to remember it being free,
please correct me if I'm wrong.) So, in that case, where is a good place
to find SCSI tape drives? And on the same subject, does anyone have any
opinions on the Amiga-specific tape backup systems the various hard drive
package sellers offer? Looking through a recent AmigaWorld, the Xetec
FasTape seems to be significantly cheaper than the others... is it a reasonable
system or are the others better?
4) Removable hard drives
Nice, but they all seem to be a bit pricey. The Syquest at ~$550
seems OK, but the media price seems a bit high for me. And since convenient
random access isn't a priority I don't think it is worth the extra cost.
I haven't seen any other removable drives within my limited financial range...
are there any good ones I am missing?
Thanks for your time... I hope I didn't bore you with all the questions.
I will be happy to post a summary of any responses I recieve.
--Rob
--
Rob Tillotson Internet: akl@mace.cc.purdue.edu
400 N. River Rd. #1418 BITNET: ROBT@PURCCVM
West Lafayette, IN 47906 Fido: 1:201/40.302