Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ucbvax!husc6!endor!stew
From: stew@endor.harvard.edu (Stew Rubenstein)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Megadrive
Message-ID: <3532@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 12 Dec 87 19:27:26 GMT
References: <127200013@inmet>
Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu
Reply-To: stew@endor.UUCP (Stew Rubenstein)
Organization: Aiken Computation Lab Harvard, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 34

In article <127200013@inmet> ian@inmet.UUCP writes:
>
>Does anybody have any comments or experience with Jasmine's Megadrive.
>How do the 10-meg floppies(?) compare to real hard disks in speed?
>Do you find yourself with insufficient space for daily work?
>(I'm torn between buying a 40-meg hard drive or something like a
>megadrive which would give me more space but less at a time.)
>I would appreciate any comments or advice.

I have had four of them for a few weeks now.  I like them a lot,
but dealing with Jasmine can be a pain.  Now that they have dropped
their credit card surcharge, I'd go that way.  Cash prepaid is not
reasonable terms.

I wouldn't try to use a single megadrive as your only large capacity
disk.  They are useful in two circumstances: 1, as backup or archival
media, and 2, if you have a lot of machines and you want to check out
disks and lock up the disks at the end of the day.

They are not too slow, disktimer 2 numbers of R:149, W:266, S:27,
compared to 98, 99, 36 for a Jasmine 20Mb direct drive.  In other
words, about the same as a slow hard disk (the AST-2000 leaps to
mind with a shudder).

The main problem with relying solely on the Megadrive is that it would
be a real pain to copy a lot of stuff from one to another.  If you had
several small projects it might work, but in my opinion, it's backup
media.


Stew Rubenstein
Cambridge Scientific Computing, Inc.
UUCPnet:    seismo!harvard!rubenstein            CompuServe: 76525,421
Internet:   rubenstein@harvard.harvard.edu       MCIMail:    CSC