jason@madnix.UUCP (Jason Blochowiak) (05/24/90)
In article <12896@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes: >GS/OS with Apple's High-Speed SCSI Card supports fast SCSI drives >efficiently at 1:1 interleave, assuming the peripheral has a good >data buffer (e.g. track or cylinder), which I'm pretty sure the >Seagate ST296N does, based on timing tests I ran, and possibly also >the SyQuest SQ555 (I don't have timing data for it yet, but it >"feels" like it might). GS/OS also has internal block caches. The little data sheet I got with my SQ555 says that it has an 8k internal cache. I can't seem to find the aforementioned data sheet, so I can't say how many sectors/track it has, but I would imagine that 8k would handle at least one track... Also, in another of your posts you said that the thing ran with a 25ms average access time. It's my understanding that the older model had a 25ms access time, but the newer models were either 20 or 21ms (I think that these were claims made by the packaged drive sellers, which was backed up by that missing piece of paper...). In any case, the things are certainly fast enough to make me and my Mac happy, and they were noticeably faster than my ST277N when I had them hooked up to my IIgs. As long as I'm mentioning it (and because it looks like I'll be getting my review done roughly the same time that all of the dead bad people will be having a snowball fight), mine take about 16 seconds to spin up, and about 8 seconds to spin down - this means that it takes roughly 30 seconds to change a cart. The drivers, et al., that shipped with System 5.0 didn't have a problem with the drives (or with swapping them while in the Finder). However, the Finder didn't let me "throw away" any of the unmounted volumes (or unmount a volume by throwing it away), so when swapping a bunch of the carts in and out, the desktop gets mighty cluttered. -- Jason Blochowiak - jason@madnix.UUCP or, try: astroatc!nicmad!madnix!jason@spool.cs.wisc.edu "Education, like neurosis, begins at home." - Milton R. Saperstein