Re: Vulcan Gold or Turbo IDE

[behrenss@hphalle6.informatik.tu-muenchen.de (Soenke Behrens)]

Joseph Blas (blasjw@ntmtv.UUCP) wrote:

: I need some serious advice.  I have a Vulcan 40 meg. hard drive which
: is pretty slow.  From what I understand the Vulcan Gold upgrade is a
: new controller that increases the speed.  I think heard some bad
: things about the Vulcan Gold though.  That guy in Germany put an add in GS+
: for his Turbo IDE card.  I've heard it's supposed to be pretty good
: but it's expensive.

Hmm. The Turbo IDE is considerably faster (about twice the speed of a Vulcan
Gold), since it uses DMA and highly optimized routines. Thus the relatively
high price. The Turbo IDE is capable of working with 8MB of memory, even
with DMA on, and even if there is a TWGS in the system :) In addition, you
could hook up an IDE tape drive to it (instead of a second HD).

If you want speed, the Turbo IDE is well worth it's money. It outperforms my
RF SCSI Rev.D speed-wise, yet only slightly :)

Oh, one thing I forgot: Some very old Vulcans use mechanims that are _not_
fully IDE compatible. The Turbo IDE won't work with these mechanisms. There
is a program to determine wether your Vulcan'll work with the Turbo IDE,
if you want, I can put it on c.b.a2.

And yes, I _am_ biased. So what? ;-)

Soenke

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