Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!rutgers!sunybcs!boulder!garth From: garth@sigi.Colorado.EDU (Garth Snyder) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Need info on Mac MIDI and Jasmine Summary: Alternate viewpoint: LaCie drives considered Great! Message-ID: <7045@sigi.Colorado.EDU> Date: 10 Jul 88 22:32:32 GMT References: <127200033@inmet> <17000117@clio> Reply-To: garth@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Garth Snyder) Followup-To: comp.sys.mac Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder Lines: 31 In article <17000117@clio brewer@clio.las.uiuc.edu writes: ... The Cirrus has gotten good marks all around for their small size, nice case, and excelent worksmanship. The LaCie 80 has the fastest access time of any external I have seen (18 ms). It uses the Quantum drive, with their special DisCache buffer (64K of RAM that caches each track as it is read). All in is a good drive... The problems occur with the driver software. In general, it looks pretty slick, with multiple, automount, password-protectable partitions, that can be accessed from a DA. BUT, there is a _MAJOR_ fatal flaw in their driver. If for any reason you are forced to do a 'dirty' restart (like hitting the programmers switch, or pulling the plug) it trashes the disk directory. Your drive will not boot after a 'dirty' restart. This sounds like one hosebag of a situation, and my intent is not to defend LaCie on this count. However, I'd like to put in a pitch for my Cirrus 60 external, which has never given me an instant of trouble in the year that I've owned it. The software is the same (Silver Lining), but it works flawlessly on the 60 Meg drive (and presumably the 20 and 40, as well). It's very fast and small, and I've carried it around to all kinds of places without incident. Check it out. -------------------- Garth Snyder UUCP: boulder!garth Univ. of CO @ Boulder ARPA: garth@boulder.colorado.edu --------------------