t-jacobs@utah-cs.UUCP (Tony Jacobs) (09/28/87)
Anyone who is thinking of buying a new Hard Disk should seriously check out the Cirrus Drives by LaCie. I just got a 60Megger that is extremly fast, very cheap, quiet, and nice looking! What else could you want? A reliable company, of course. I'll get to that story in a minute. size internal external intrlve Avg.Acces Trck-Trck Max-time 21.5 $449 $599 2:1 68ms 15ms 150ms 31.5 599 699 1:1 65 15 65 40.0 699 799 2:1 60 10 40 61.5 899 999 1:1 40 8 85 Note: The interleave is 1:1 for all drives when used on a Mac II. 1 Year warranty. All drives about 3" x 6" x 9". Weigh about 4lbs. The software that comes with it lets you install any combination of 6 different SCSI drivers for either the read or write (meaning you can mix them). They are: Standard Mac "Handshake" Standard Mac "Blind" SilverLinings slow "Handshake" SilverLinings fast "Handshake" SilverLinings slow "Blind" SilverLinings fast "Blind" Which combination you use depends on which machine you are running. The Mac II is faster than the disk drive so you can't use Blind transfers if I understand that correctly. The software comes with defaults for the machine you are on. The software will let you partition the disk and put a password on the partitions. The passwording is at the driver level so you can't cirumvent it by booting off of another disk. The software will also let you patch into the shut down manager and park your heads at shutdown time. DiskTimerII results. Drive 100 24k Reads 100 24k Writes 80 1Meg seeks DataFrame XP20 52 55 38 DataFrame XP40 52 51 18 Cirrus C 60 59 60 14 One other test I did is duplicate a 1Meg file from the Finder, 10 seconds! History: The company is run by Joel Kammerman who use to run Kammermon Labs. They went into Chapter 11 mostly for non financial reasons and because of their IBM side of the business. They also experienced some real growth pains, they went from $200,000 a month to $600,000 a month which they couldn't handle. But they were doing ok in their Chapter 11 reorganization efforts until MacWorld came out with an article that said they had closed their doors! So they said what the heck and went off and started another company. They have 4 years worth of experience and are still handling warranties from Kammerman Labs. LaCie 16285 S.W. 85th, No.306 Tigard, Oregon 97224 (503)684-0143 Tell them I sent ya, but you won't get a better price. I don't have any connection with LaCie other than being a satisified customer. Tony Jacobs Center for Engineering Design University of Utah