Re: Smartport Hard drive?

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Greg Andrzejewski <pressyourluck85@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I've seen a few sites mentioning the existance of smartport hard drives for
> the Apple IIgs. Were any ever produced?

I doubt any were specifically produced for the IIgs, but they were
avaialable for the IIc, and the same drives would work on the IIgs.  The
design I'm aware of consisted of an external case incorporating a
SmartPort to SCSI protocol converter, and a SCSI hard drive mechanism.
They were originally made by Chinook, if I remember right.

For the IIc, there was no other alternative - the SmartPort was the only
suitable external port for connecting a hard drive.  The problem is that
SmartPort is very slow (by hard drive standards) so you end up with a
hard drive that isn't much faster than a 5.25" floppy or UniDisk 3.5
(data transfer rate is similar - all you save is the seek time and
rotational latency).  The only real benefit is the convenience of having
all your files in one place.

For the IIe or IIgs, a SCSI or IDE hard drive is a vastly better
experience.  Even with an original Apple SCSI card, a IIgs is able to
transfer data to and from a SCSI hard drive up to four times faster than
a SmartPort hard drive (a IIe wouldn't get quite as much benefit, and
neither would a IIgs running ProDOS-8).  With an Apple High-Speed SCSI
card or RamFast SCSI card, the performance is even better.  I haven't
done speed tests on IDE cards, but I expect they would be similar to the
original Apple card (perhaps a little faster), as I don't think they are
using DMA.

> What would be my chances of finding one?

Difficult.  The SmartPort hard drives were pretty rare.

> SCSI and IDE cards are so expensive... :-(

I expect it would work out about the same.

Have you looked for a Focus hard drive?  It is an IDE controller with
2.5" hard drive mounted directly on it.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz