umrose05@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Dave Rose) (09/08/90)
Hi, I am just curious as to if anyone out there has purchased one of these 44MB removable hard drives? The drive is made by SyQuest and it seems to be a SCSI device. Has anyone used one of these, and if so are they worth while getting? Dave -- Dave Rose : Local (UnixWS) - UMRose05@CCU.UManitoba.CA P.O. Box 403 : Local (Amdahl) - #Rose05@CCM.UManitoba.CA Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: UUCP Node #005 - drose@trash.UUCP R2M-5H3 :
pnl@hpfinote.HP.COM (Peter Lim) (09/11/90)
Yeap ! I've used the SyQuest (in fact TWO of them ! I sold my first one
to my brother and bought another one).
Yes, they are SCSI (as far as I can tell). If you get them from Hard
Disk International (which is the cheapest place I know), they usually
come with the Seagate ST-01 host adapter which is worthless in my
opinion. Anyway, I couldn't get the ST-01 to co-exist with my DTC-6280
ESDI controller. You might want to try that and return the ST-01 for
swap when you find out that they don't work. Which is what I did for
the first system.
I am using the SyQuest with an ALWAYS IN-2000 host adapter and achieved
a raw transfer rate of about 570 Kbyte per second (according to
CORETEST). The IN-2000 also includes floppy controller. Since the IN-2000
is advertised as capable of transfer rate > 1 MByte per second, I would
assume that the 570 KB limit is due to the SyQuest drive (can anyone
confirm that ?). The average seek time is about 29 ms. And works almost
perfectly.. .... Well, I did find 2 bad sectors in two disks after a
week of using; but have not found any more since then.
I have also tested and confirmed that this thing works with an Adaptec
AHA-1542 SCSI host adapter (provided your computer works with the
AHA-1542 :-)).
I have not bother to use the SyQuest device driver. I just ask SUPERPCK
to flush the cache before I change a catridge and do a CHKDSK on the
SyQuest drives after the change. Everything works fine even under
Windows 3.0 enhanced mode !
The SyQuest is real nice for fairly big amount of data that you want
quick access but can't afford to keep them all online (like GIF image
files, etc etc). But given the way price is coming down on big hard disks
these days, you need to have at least 6 to 7 SyQuest catridges to break
even (which comes to about $1000 for 250 MB). But the beauty is that
you can add 44 MB incrementally at about $80 each from then on.
Another nice thing is that if you use DOS 3.3 or earlier, having only
44 MB online at a time will prevent you from running out of drive number
;-) (assuming you are using max 32 MB partitions). Also, keeping you
data offline adds another protection against them being totally wiped
out in one go (just being paranoid).
And about a year ago, someone mentioned that they have got this thing
working under XENIX using the standard SCSI device driver.
Of course the SyQuest is not a performance screamer compared to big
hard disks like CDC, Maxtor which has access time < 15 ms.
Regards, ## Life is fast enough as it is ........
Peter Lim. ## .... DON'T PUSH IT !! >>>-------,
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