Re: E-Bay Driving Up Apple II Prices

[CUTblakeney@home.com (Jeff Blakeney)]

On 16 Aug 2000 19:46:07 -0500, tanya@belly.net (Tanya) wrote:

>Personally, I don't know why everyone used to rag on the CMS card.  It
>works just fine.  If all you want is a hard drive then go for it.
>It's easier to set up than the RamFast card - it automatically makes
>as many 32 meg volumes as needed to use your entire drive capacity and
>all are mounted under GS OS 6.01.  The only downside is that you can
>only have 2 volumes mounted when you boot ProDOS, but you get to
>choose which 2.  I don't know about you, but 64 megs under ProDOS is
>*plenty* for me!!
>
>If you want a CDROM and ZIP drive and who knows what else then the CMS
>card is not for you.  I have a RamFast rev B and an Apple SCSI but the
>only one I use is the CMS.  The RamFast is way overrated IMO, and also
>way overpriced - when I was shopping for a SCSI card the RamFast was
>$149!  No thanks!  There was simply no way I was going to spend that
>much for a SCSI card when I got the machine for free!  I picked up the
>rev B RamFast later in another system I got, again for free!
>
>The rev B RamFast I have is a little faster booting up but once
>running performance is virtually identical to the CMS.  The typical
>small programs used on the GS simply don't benefit from cache.

I don't know about that.  I recently switched from a RamFAST Rev D
v3.01f ROMs with 256K cache to an Apple High Speed SCSI card (I added
a CD-ROM drive to my system and my IIgs kept locking up when using the
RamFAST).  I have noticed that the boot speed is slower and Spectrum
launches slower now.

Maybe the Rev B RamFAST just wasn't as fast as the Rev D.

I've also heard that the RamFAST just blows everything else away when
running ProDOS 8.  I can't really comment on that, though, as I use
very few 8 bit programs on my IIgs.

Before getting the better SCSI cards I used a card from AMR (possibly
a CMS card but I'm not sure) and it wasn't a whole lot faster than
using a 3.5" floppy.  :-)

By the way, I currently have several SCSI mechanisms I like to swap
around on my machines (PC with SCSI card, Mac IIsi and IIgs') which
include hard drives, SyQuest EZ135 (as well as an old 44MB and 88MB
removable drives but I have no cartridges for them), Iomega Jaz drive,
CD-ROM drive and two old magneto-optical drives.  I kind of like
having the better SCSI cards so I can swap drives around without
having to worry about whether they will work or not.  :-)

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