Re: Apple disk drive...

[et472@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Michael Black)]

"Hon Tseng" (pcuser45@yahoo.com) writes:
> Commodore 1541 disk drive is always slow. Atari 1050 disk drive is always
> fast. IBM disk drive is always Ultra-fast. How fast is Apple 140k disk
> drive? Does it speed faster than Atari 1050?
> 
> Hon
> 
> 
One reason the Commodore (and at least some Atari) drives are slow
is that they are connected to the computers via a serial port.
That tends to be relatively slow, if for no other reason than that
the bits go one at a time rather than in parallel.  I suspect they
weren't all that fast a serial connection, either.  The drive itself
can't do anything until the information is transferred, and that
serial port is a bottleneck.

The IBM and the Apple (plus plenty of other computers) have
the disk controller connected via a parallel connection, so
they tend to be faster.

Judging the speed of the actual drive is a different matter,
and I have no idea about that.

  Michael