Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!pbhya!dbsuther
From: dbsuther@PacBell.COM (Daniel B. Suthers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Hard Drive Speeds
Summary: fast is better, removable media fragile
Message-ID: <29194@pbhya.PacBell.COM>
Date: 9 Aug 89 09:57:25 GMT
References: <1275@blackbird.afit.af.mil>
Reply-To: dbsuther@PacBell.COM (Daniel B. Suthers)
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA
Lines: 37

In article <1275@blackbird.afit.af.mil> bhodges@blackbird.afit.af.mil writes:
>I was wondering, is the diff between the slower (i.e. Atari Megafile 30)
>hard drives and the quicker (28 ms) drives noticeable in day-to-day
>usage.  I understand I can get a Megafile 30 for $499 and am debating
>about holding out for a faster (& more expensive) drive.
>
>On another note, how about some reports on these 'Frog' drives :-} with
>the removable media.  Fast? Reliable? Standard? Compatible (with Atari-
>'soon'-to-be-released-drives)? 

The faster drives are noticeably faster.  If you are useing file based
based utilities such as arc, a compiler, MTC (a multi tasking shell), or
Minix you will notice a VAST improvement ( about 4 times faster ).  Many 
graphics programs also write to the disk often.

The FROG drive appears to be based on the Syquest drives.  I have used their
10 meg disks, and find them to be usable, but pretty fragile.  You can lose
a disk by dropping it 2 feet onto a desk.  The ones I used were also VERY
susceptible to power hits.  A 1 second outage was guaranteed to cause data
corruption.  A suprising feature was that the drives also are sensitive 
about their orientation.  They don't work well on their sides.

Keep in mind that it is a hard disk, and the heads can crash just like
those with fixed media.  If you make the mistake of putting a crashed disk
back into a drive you might end up with a bad head which will trash any
other $100 disks you insert afterwards.

Don't get me wrong though.  As soon as I can get a hands on demo I plan to
consider the purchase my-self. 	It would be great for setting up a development
disk, a MAC disk, and a dos disk without fear of accidently corrupting each
other.  I am aware of the risks, and can be careful enough to reduce them
to a reasonable level.  Who knows,  they may have added auto parking, power
tolerance, enhanced quality control and all the other things a personal
computer user needs  :^).

Dan Suthers
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