Re: Vulcan HDs

[Wayne Stewart <waynes@intergate.bc.ca>]

Paul Grammens wrote:

> I looked at the drive in one of my Vulcans, and noticed it was an old WD
> similiar to one I had scrounged from a 286. I swapped it in, formatted it,
> and and loaded the GSOS, and it works fine. It's a WD93044-A, and it seems a
> bit faster than the original drive, perhaps because it has 1:1 interleave
> due to onboard cache.
>
> I also tried a 105 meg drive, which was detected and seemed to format, but
> it didn't work. When I get a chance, I'll try playing with that again.
>
> I like these Vulcans. They are internal, cool the whole machine, and seem
> just as fast as my SCSI drives.  The name and the black color are pretty
> cool too.
> -Paul

I haven't checked them with a stopwatch but the two I have seem about as
fast as  my Apple SCSI cards. However they do seem quite a bit slower than
my Ramfasts an either the IIgs or the IIe. Especially reloading something, the
1mb cache makes a difference there. Wish I had a chance to compare the
Vulcan Gold with the Ramfast or the Apple SCSI cards.

Internal is nice, especially on computers you don't have set up all the time.
I was tempted to put a SCSI drive in the IIe Vulcan, then I realized there was
plenty of room to hang a 3.5" HD below the IIe keyboard. Had an extra cable
going to a DB25 connector at the back so I could hook up another HD or
CD-ROM as needed. I was using a high output power supply so I added an
extra connector to power the HD. So now my Vulcans sit in the corner with
my Sider drives.

I can see that they'd help cool the power supply and HD and on the IIgs the
fans outflow is directed at a vent but I can't see them doing anything for the
IIe.
If the fans outflow had been on the left side then it might done a lot to cool
the
IIe. But then it seemed like anyone with more than a basic system had a
Kensington system saver anyways.

     Wayne