Duel@cup.portal.com (Omid M Farr) (09/01/90)
I'm looking for personal/magazines reviews (and opinions) on WORMs. I was in the market for a large capacity hard drive (~360-400megs), but it seems the price of a 80 meg hard drive and a WORM (~$650. I havent had a chance to really look at WORM prices) is about the same as a 400 meg hard drive. I definitely need the hard drive for erasing files, but the WORM would seem to be very useful for storing files. I have a WD-7000 SCSI controller if that makes a difference in my available choices. How fast do WORMs rated against hard drives? I hear they have around a 250ms access time, but compared to a hard drive's 16-20 ms, does it really mean anything else? I don't think I mind too much to wait an extra 1/4th of a second for it to find the file, but will it be loading the file at the same Mb/sec rate? Thanks. Email preferred and I'll post a summary if there is interest. Duel@cup.portal.com
Duel@cup.portal.com (Omid M Farr) (09/15/90)
Thanks to those who sent me email in reference to information about WORM drives. Basically I found out that technology isnt where I thought. These drives (Large capacity ~400-500) run around $2,000. When manufacturers mention something like 800megs, they are talking about 400megs per side. I decided to go with the ISi WORM-TOS. Approximately a 220 meg system, and the only system in my price range. I wasn't too disappointed until I found out it was only about 110megs per side. So far, I am quite impressed with it. There are some problems I encountered and the second side of the cartridge I received isnt working properly (which I will have to return) and the instructions aren't very helpful with trouble shooting. I'd appreciate comments from anyone who owns such a drive and can tell me how to format >32meg partitions without using their NO32.COM which doesn't seem to be working properly with my version of DOS (4.01). The unit has about a 150-200ms access time. The only "slowness" is finding the file, but booting it up is fairly quick. In general I think this WORM drive fits right between floppies and hard drives. The price per megabyte is hard to beat. (~$.60. $130 for double sided cartridges. Better savings with the larger units where cartridges seem to be the same price.) Speed is much faster than a floppy drive. Of course, it can't be compared with an equivalent hard drive. Hopefully I will be able to squeeze out 3-4 disks from it, otherwise I could have probably gotten a better deal going with a large hard drive. (340-380megs) I paid around $749 for the unit. If anyone knows of something better still please let me know, I still have 90 days. (But I needed something like this immediately so I went ahead and purchased it). I'd appreciate some mail from owners of this drive and questions about the drive are welcome. duel@cup.portal.com