🚀 go-pugleaf

In <43fr7k$2sk_002@nntp.best.com> sandy@sandy.com (Sandy A. Meltzer)
writes: 
>
>Hello all,
>
>I'm considering adding a 1Gb+ Optical drive (MO?) to my
>Win95/NT3.51 Pentium-based workstation and would appreciate
>some feedback about optical drives and manufacturers.
>
>For example, how do the various optical products compare
>between Maxoptix vs Pinnacle vs NEC vs Fujitsu, etc.?
>Should I compare access times, rotational speed, or what?
>Does one manufacturer make a better quality drive compared
>to another or are they basically similar?
>
>I see a wide range of prices and was wondering if an optical
>drive like the 1.3Gb NEC at $999 is as functional as a Maxoptix
>(Tahiti-3 or 4)at $1700?  Does one company provide better software
>or support?
>
>
>Any feedback or buying suggestions would be most appreciated.
>
Sandy,
   I was one of the designers of the Maxoptix Tahiti 2 and Tahiti 3
drives.  I am no longer an employee of Maxoptix, and have no bias, so
here's the straight story:  The Tahiti 3 and the drive from HP were the
fastest drives on the market last time I checked.  People WILL give you
all kinds of misleading specs to prove that their drive is faster. 
Pinnacle is one of the WORST of the bunch, quoting seek times over a
small band of the disk's surface, instead of 1/3 stroke seek.  (There
is a big difference between 1/3 stroke seek, and seek over 1/3 of a
50MB area, or some other misleading spec.)  Their drive is really
fairly slow, and their marketing is very misleading.  They do have an
advanced cacheing controller that makes up for the slow mechanism for
some situations.  The Japanese drives are for the most part solid if
not fast performers. The Tahiti 4 is a half hight drive which is made
by one of the Japanese manufacturers and resold by Maxoptix. The amount
of noninformation, disinformation, lies and misunderstanding about
optical recording is amazing.  Any of the systems will perform OK as a
backup device, but my Tahiti 3 with 4MB cache outperformed my IDE hard
drives on reads and did pretty well on writes.  (Magneto-optical
recording requires an erase pass before a write, so write throughput is
degraded.  This is where the cache helps a lot.)  Any questions please
post or Email me-
                                                 Good Luck,
                                                        John