🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4ckquf$fc1@comet2.magicnet.net>, johna@magicnet.net (John Anderson) writes:
|> In article <4ckeon$6tg@natasha.rmii.com>, mdaymon@rainbow.rmii.com (Maxwell Daymon) says:
|> >* The Zip drive is cheap. $199 for a drive with 100MB, and $159 for an 
|> >internal version (I don't know if that includes a disk, however). That's 
|> >not too bad: If they unbundled the disk the price could drop $15 or $20.
|> >
|> >* Zip disks are cheaper ($14.95 each in a ten pack) and even a cent less 
|> >per MB when compared to SyQuest EZ carts. Further, Zip disks are most 
|> >likely to drop in price while EZ carts are most likely to stay the same 
|> >or go up. As I've said before, SyQuest EZ cartridges are nearly identical 
|> >to the 270MB carts that sell for $80 - I doubt the price difference is 
|> >justified.
|> 
|> Both the ZIP and EZ are in the price ballpark which made them attractice to
|> me.  $20 for a EZ cartridge with 25% more storage than the ZIP kinda evens
|> for me.

Where are you getting the 25% more number?  My calculations put the number
at closer to 40%.  A formatted zip is aoubt 94Meg while a formatted zip
with a partition is 131Meg while formatting as a big floppy under os2
(then usable on any os) set the capacity at 133Meg.  Even the raw numbers
of 100 vs 135 don't equate to 25%

|> >However, the Zip drive comes out to slightly LESS per megabyte than the 
|> >EZ drive when you buy in packs of ten. 25MB disks will be even less 
|> >(meaning something companies can send out with demo software without 
|> >taking a huge loss) and performance... I don't have my figures readily 
|> >available, but on rather large transfers (>5MB) the difference was a 
|> >matter of seconds (SCSI drives, of course).
|> >
|> >The market for high capacity removable storage isn't the point with the 
|> >Zip drive. Replacing a floppy technology that should have died years ago 
|> >- that's the point.
|> 
|> I choose the EZ for performance reasons.  Between track access time and
|> transfer rate I really don't the ZIP drive would be adequate for me.  At
|> the EZs 1.7MByte transfer rate, a couple of seconds for a 5 MByte file
|> is significant (66% slower).  I don't know if you can run coretest.exe
|> on the ZIP.  It tests hard disks and the EZ looks exactly like an HD.
|> If speed isn't an issue then the ZIP drive might be a better choice.
|> 
|> If anyone has an idea how to perform some definitive performance testing,
|> I would be happy to contribute my time to test both SCSI and IDE EZ
|> drives and post the results.  We should all try to use the same programs
|> to perform the tests.  I have already noticed that the SCSI EZ is slower
|> than the IDE EZ under WFW 3.11.

Are you running a bus master scsi system?  I would expect the scsi to
actually be faster given the right interface.
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