chandler@beagle.uucp (Jim Chandler) (09/07/90)
A while back I ask about the SyQuest drives under ESIX for my 386 box at home. I have a Dell 310 with the Adaptec 1542A. I was looking for ways to back up my Miniscribe 9380S (330 Meg) HD. Here are the responses that I have received. I decided to purchase the Syquest drive and got it from Hard Drives International for $380. The cartridges are $79 each. So far it seems to work great under ESIX. I have not tried it under DOS yet and probably won't use it there. It mounts as a standard HD. SyQuest has a bbs at 415-656-0473 which answer questions and has programs and drivers for the drive under numerous platform. Thanks to Joe at SyQuest for answering all my questions. I am very pleased with the drive so far. I would recommend it as an alternative to tape. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- My wife and I use them on Macs. They are great, sturdy, but you'll want either two drives or enough free space somewhere else that you can copy 44 meg on to it, so you can do disk to disk copies. Feel free to ask me questions. -- -- David Phillip Oster - Note new signature. Old one has gone Bye Bye. -- oster@well.sf.ca.us = {backbone}!well!oster --------------------------------------------------------------------------- My experiences are DOS-based, but... Syquests ARE the greatest thing since sliced bread, if you use care. Do you know the warning on CDs that say with proper care they will last forever? Well, I've got 50 of 'em that are already trashed. Syquests are the same. With a syquest, you *MUST* wait until the drive spins down before you pull the disk. There is *NO* interlock preventing you from ripping it out of the drive while the heads are still on the platter. We have had multiple clients who complain that their disks have just "gone bad" inexplicably. A surface test using norton determines streaks of bad sectors, one for each head. The worst part is that it probably trashed the drive. I wish I had one for home use so that I could use it for games, backups, etc. also. But ask yourself: How do you back up a syquest? If you don't have two drives or 40 meg available on your hard disk subsystem, you're SOL. :-( The only experience I have had with bernoulli drives are the 8" monsters. They were 10 and 20 meg cartridges. If the 5.25" versions are anything like the 8" ones, STAY AWAY AT ALL COSTS! They are slow, bulky, slow, unreliable, slow, you couldn't mix the 10 and 20 meg cartridges, slow... I think you get the picture. I hope this helps! Josh Muskovitz Computer Design, Inc. josh@uunet!cditi Disclaimer: My employer doesn't even appro- >ack< [message terminated] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I had one here at ISC for a while a couple of years ago to see if it'd work with our HPDD and an Adaptec 1542 SCSI board. The answer -- yes, but... There were some problems early on in that the drives came configured to use 256-byte sectors (there's now a hack in the HPDD to support this, sigh). It took us quite a while to get any program that would change this (Roy Neese had his SCSI config program available on 'adaptex' but that seems to be gone, these days). ISC Unix currently doesn't support removable SCSI disk media. This will (I think) change in the next upgrade release (2.3?, 2.2.1? who knows?). Right now you can only use the cartridge that is in the machine and spun up when the system inits. They seem to work, though. I talked to some people who were having trouble with them in harsher-than- normal-office environments. They don't do a real good cleaning and air purge of the cartridges when you load them, so airborne contaminants can cause problems. Oh yeah, one more thing. When doing multi sector transfers, the SyQuest drives ONLY disconnect from the SCSI bus when they have to change cylinders! This completely kills performance on any other SCSI devices on the bus. A major bugaboo, and the SyQuest people I talked to a couple of years ago had NO plans to change this behavior. Please let me know what kinds of things you get back, especially concerning the Bernoulli boxes; I've never tried one and I'm curious. Thanx, DLP ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I own a SyQuest SQ-555 44M REMOVABLE hard drive.... and IT IS THE NEATEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD! Well that's it in a nutshell... I own the SyQuest as do 2 of my friends. We are all very happy with our purchases. The drives are fast. They seem to be reliable... knock on wood. I, myself, own 2 cartridges (SQ-400's). I think it is a super advantage to be able to buy 44Megs of FAST storage for around $79! As I said 2 of my friends have SyQuests also, and we are often at each other's houses with our cartridges... Between the 3 of us we have 7 cartridges and (obviously) 3 drives. All of the cartridges are 100% compatible in all 3 drives. I think this says something about the SyQuest. It works just like a 44Meg FLOPPY! One note, you will need a device driver if you intend on swapping cartridges "On the fly." That is without rebooting. I believe that SyQuest has this available for IBM's. (At least it says so in their instruction manual.) My SyQuest (and my friends) are running on our ATARI ST computers. We have a device driver which allows us to swap disks on the fly. It is truly like using super fast floppies. If you have any other questions, please feel free to e-mail me. Hope this helps, Jim Tauberg jimmy@unix.cis.pitt.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am using the SyQuest 44 meg removable hard drive under Rev D. I don't know about a 44 meg "floppy" --- Jeff Ellis ESIX SYSTEM/V UUCP:uunet!zardoz!everex!jde US Mail: 1923 St. Andrew Place, Santa Ana, CA 92705 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Jim Chandler asuvax!xroads!beagle!chandler chandler@beagle.UUCP