unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) (06/24/91)
In article <1991Jun24.032653.5683@utstat.uucp> philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough) writes: >Average seek time=66ms, Average latency=16.7ms, Disk transfer rate=4.35Mbs, UGGH! 66 ms? And I thought my 35 ms (I think that's right) Seagate drive was bad! (and it IS! but it was $150 for a 40 meg drive.. I hope to upgrade since I have a job this summer) >As for the flopticals, they are still unavailable. This one can be ordered. >Education prices vary but are below $1000US. The unit also plays 3.5" >CD-ROM's. That's wrong. One of the two main companies, Brier or Insite, has started selling their drives. I do not remember where my info comes from, but I know I heard/read it somewhere. Both may be selling their drives by now. -- /unknown@ucscb.ucsc.edu Apple IIGS Forever! unknown@cats.ucsc.edu\ |WANT to help get ULTIMA VI //e or GS written?-mail me. CHEAP CD info-mail me.| \ It's a Late Night World.... Of Love /
philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough) (06/25/91)
In article <17359@darkstar.ucsc.edu> unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) writes: >In article <1991Jun24.032653.5683@utstat.uucp> philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough) writes: >>Average seek time=66ms, Average latency=16.7ms, Disk transfer rate=4.35Mbs, > UGGH! 66 ms? And I thought my 35 ms (I think that's right) Seagate >drive was bad! (and it IS! but it was $150 for a 40 meg drive.. I hope to >upgrade since I have a job this summer) Seek time is not as important as throughput for many purposes. I think you'll find the throughput quite acceptable. I often use my NeXT from an optical (which is far slower re access time) and it's perfectly fine. Having more memory helps of course( there). >>As for the flopticals, they are still unavailable. This one can be ordered. >>Education prices vary but are below $1000US. The unit also plays 3.5" >>CD-ROM's. > That's wrong. One of the two main companies, Brier or Insite, has >started selling their drives. I do not remember where my info comes from, but >I know I heard/read it somewhere. Both may be selling their drives by now. Brier and Insite have sent their drives to OEM's. I have yet to see a floptical for sale by any company. At the very least you'd find them advertising in MacWeek or PCWeek and it has certainly not caught my attention. Philip McDunnough University of Toronto
rhyde@sisler.ucr.edu (randy hyde) (06/26/91)
Optical drive read times are okay, but the write times (on the drives I've used) are pretty bad. I've used the 35ms Tahiti optical from MacInStor which (at the time anyway) was the fastest drive out there. For writing, it was only a tiny bit faster than the floppy. For reading, it was about as fast as the slowest hard disks running on old 5Mhz XT/PC machines. *** Randy Hyde rhyde@ucrmath.ucr.edu
taob@micor.ocunix.on.ca (Brian Tao) (06/29/91)
philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough) writes: > In article <17359@darkstar.ucsc.edu> unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown > User) writes: > > > > UGGH! 66 ms? And I thought my 35 ms (I think that's right) Seagate > >drive was bad! (and it IS! but it was $150 for a 40 meg drive.. I hope to > >upgrade since I have a job this summer) > Seek time is not as important as throughput for many purposes. I think > you'll find the throughput quite acceptable. I often use my NeXT from > an optical (which is far slower re access time) and it's perfectly > fine. Having more memory helps of course( there). Having some sort of disk caching would help even more... GS/OS and ProDOS 8 (especially) move the drive head(s) around a lot; reading the directory structure, getting the file entry, writing out the file, etc. You don't see very large files on the Apple II (relatively speaking). So the advantage gained by the high transfer rate is not as apparent. The RAMFast might be a good controller for it (assuming it has enough standard SCSI to understand the IBM drive), with its disk cache. Does this floptical have its own built-in cache?