madler@piglet.caltech.edu (Mark Adler) (09/28/90)
barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) asks: >madler@piglet.caltech.edu (Mark Adler) writes: >>reluctant to get one from an independant company ever since I bought >>a CubeFloppy 1.4 and sent it back after being rather disappointed. >Care to give us a review, or your reasons for disappointment? Well, ok. This might not be fair since my numero uno complaint may have been due to a bad unit, however the remaining complaints were enough for me to not desire a good one. The problems were: 1. It did not read and write reliably to a Mac using Apple File Exchange. that Mac would, however, read and write PC disks with no problem. (The current release of the CubeFloppy 1.4 software, 1.0d, does not read or write Mac formats directly, so you have to go through the PC format to get there. They say the next release, due Real Soon Now will support the Mac format.) I would usually make two copies of the file I wanted to move over (they were typically 0.5M files) and at least one of them would work (except once both failed). They thought these errors were rather odd and had no similar reports. The following problems were not contested though ... 2. Painfully slow---it would read and write at about 2.5K/s, implying it was doing one sector per rotation of the disk. A more typical rate for a 1.44M floppy is 25K/s to 45K/s (the latter as fast as it gets, achieved by buffering entire tracks). The documentation says it has a burst transfer rate of 300K/s which is probably true, but meaningless. Note that 2.5K/s is not much faster than a 19.2Kbps serial link. They claimed that this would be fixed in the next release by better buffering. 3. Annoying clicking noise---when the NeXT application that controls the floppy runs, and there is no floppy in the drive, it makes a clicking noise every second as it checks to see if there is a disk in there. As a result, I could not leave the application running as I do with the other applications I use (at least not and retain my sanity at the same time), but rather had to launch it each time. And we all know how slow launching applications is (was?). This should not be necessary, since all the 1.4M drives that I know about have a disk change line that carries the necessary information. 4. It would not read and write Mac formats directly (see 1). 5. Non-NeXT-like application---it had little annoyances in its behavior like the browser not working like Workspace, error messages appearing in unexpected blank spaces of panels, Alert-like panels with close buttons, etc. It was more true of this application than any other non-NeXT Inc application I've used on the NeXT. (They blaimed the AppKit for this, but I say it's just not paying attention.) 6. Incorrect error messages---it would report disk read errors as SCSI bus failures, and tell me to check the SCSI addressing! 7. The CubeFloppy crashed a few times, and I'd unplug the power and plug it back in to get it working again. This was probably a risky thing to do, but I didn't feel like powering down the NeXT every time. (The error message told me to check the cables, which I suppose wasn't too far off the mark.) There should be a watchdog timer to reset the unit. I should mention to the company's credit (they're called DIT and are in Los Alamos, NM), that they were very receptive to my comments and complaints on the phone, and were disappointed that I decided to return the unit, but accepted it nevertheless. I returned it because I did not sense any, well, elegance in the product, and I did not feel my satisfaction would improve much, even if some of the major problems were solved. Mark Adler madler@piglet.caltech.edu