Re: floptical drives and WHERE TO GET THEM!

[jamesb@ecst.csuchico.edu (James L. Brookes)]

In article <2aSv03ArdaIW00@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> fadden@uts.amdahl.com
(Andy McFadden) writes:

>I just bought one (yay!).

Cool :)

>For SF BA people, they're at Montague & 880 in San Jose.  That's about 5
>miles from where I live, so I drove over and picked it up.

That's what I did.  Really friendly people :)

>the RamFAST manual but they threw in their drivers anyway.  BTW, you have
>to remove Apple's SCSI drivers or your system will be very confused... the
>Tulin drivers replace the SCSI manager and the SCSI HD driver.

Yup: when I ran the Installer it told me my boot partition was locked (?,
whatever) so I did a manual install.  Needless to say I had problems until
I read the Install script and noticed that I was supposed to remove the
SCSI.HD driver :)

>(Dunno if you can boot off a floptical with the HS SCSI.  The manual I have
>indicates that it works just fine with a RamFAST.)

I've noticed that the floptical is perfectly useable in p8, so I'd say
that it's probably workable.

>Performance, at least with the HS SCSI, is real bad.  Lunatic says you can
>volume-copy a floptical to a hard drive in 4 minutes, but manipulating
>files (which requires random access instead of linear access) takes
>forever.  I think it took about an hour to copy 20MB of files onto one.
>Consequently, the best strategy is to make one or more HD partitions that
>are the same size as a floptical; that way you can volume-copy the
>floptical on, do whatever you're going to do, then volume-copy it back off.

Yeah, writing speed is just a wee bit faster than a floppy.  Reading speed
seems quite a bit faster, however.  And sequential reads are decent.

I only have a 40mb drive, so I'm using my floptical for a download volume
and for source.  It seems to be working pretty well in that fashion; I
particularly like the fact that the HS SCSI drivers don't disable all
interrupts as the RamFAST does during accesses, so I don't lose characters 
when I've got stuff running in the background.

>They do read and write 720K and 1.44MB floppies, using the IBM PC encoding
>format.  The MS-DOS FST is read-only (sigh), but it works for HFS and
>ProDOS just fine.

As soon as Dave Huang finishes up his port of mtools, you'll be able to
read _and_ write from within your favorite shell.  I'll also be writing
a front end for GNO's 'cp' which will incorporate support for the mtools,
and call the appropriate executable depending on the volume types 
involved.  So, it should be pretty seamless from within GNO.

>fadden@uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)
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|          James Brookes            | Inet: bb252@cleveland.freenet.edu |
|``What, me worry?'' - A. E. Neuman |      jamesb@ecst.csuchico.edu     |
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