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 uucp: ... ihnp4!pacbell!pbeos!dbsuther