Re: SCSI devices for a IIgs

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

"Michael Pender" <mpender@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Supertimer <supertimer@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> The Zip drive was nice.  If you format the Zip disk as HFS
>> (making sure the HFS FST is installed on your IIGS
>> system disk), you don't have to partition the Zip disk.
>>
>> I found some old Apple SCSI CD-ROM drives.  I then
>> kept one of them as is for CD-ROM and removed the
>> CD-ROM from the other enclosure and installed the
>> Insider internal SCSI Zip Drive into it.  Worked great.
>> It was cool to see the black Zip drive inside the
>> platinum Apple CD-ROM case with Apple logo too.
>
>That's a clever hack--putting the zip drive in the CDROM enclosure.  I'm
>thinking about adding a Zip instead of a hard drive.  Its slower, but I'm
>not sure I'll really notice given the bus speed limitations of an Apple II.

You would think you wouldn't notice but surprisingly
the Zip drive still feels a lot more sluggish than an
SCSI hard disk drive or even a Focus IDE drive (ie.
a notebook hard drive on an IDE card).

The Zip drive was about as fast on the IIGS as the
PC Transporter card's RAM in Apple mode, used
as a slot based RAM disk.  I would say it was
at least 3 times slower than my SCSI drive and
some 2.5 times slower than my Focus drive.  Just
from feel.

What was really cool about the Zip drive was that
you could read and write to PC formatted Zip
disks with Peter Watson's MUG! utility.  I used it
to transfer a lot of large files back and forth, well
worth the $10 shareware fee.