6500boo@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (William Bushing) (11/11/90)
Greetings fellow netters... I'm (still) looking at 33 MHz 386 systems from Gateway and EPS. Hard disk choices right now focus on Micropolis 160 Mb ESDI with Adaptek 2370 64k cache controller and Maxtor 200 Mb IDE. I will be doing largely word processing, OCR and GIS work. My feeling is that as a single user, I don't need the speed ad- vantage of a caching controller. From what I've read software caching is a more cost effective approach anyway. Access times on the Maxtor and Micropolis are within 1 ms. REliability based on PC Mag recent issue appears comparable although the 150,000 MTBF rating of the Micropolis is often tauted (but I gather MTBF is a potentially meaningless attribute). I'd appreciate any comments useful in choosing between the two drives. I could use the extra 40 Mb space (In the beginning I thought dual floppies were enough, then 20 Mb HDD, then 40 Mb, then...) as I'll be doing extensive graphics work, but want a drive that will function effectively and reliability. Thanks for any comments. Bill "Life is too important to be taken seriously" - Einstein