🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <46qude$sfo@wolfe.wimsey.com>, Doug Schmidt <dougs@portal.ca> wrote:
>>      Has anyone ('Net, magazine, etc.) done a comparison of 2.1-gig AV
>>drives -- Micropolis 4221 AV, Seagate Barracuda, Quantum?
>
>We've evaluated all these drives for use with the Otari RADAR hard disk 
>recorder (which we develop) and would rank them as follows:
>
>	1)	Seagate Barracuda
>	2)	Micropolis 4221 AV
>	3)	Quantum (Grand Prix was better than Atlas)
>
>Seagate wins by a nose over Micropolis because the drive has been shipping for 
>a longer period and has had more firmware bugs worked out (make sure you order 
>your 'Cuda 2 with rev 0016 firmware or higher!)  We've been using the Cuda2 
>since about January, and its pretty good (now that the firmware is stable!).
>
>We've just started evaluating the Micropolis a month ago, and it looks to be 
>as good and as fast as the Seagate, but it's still pretty early to tell for 
>sure.

Is that the one that's actually the mechanism from the 3243, because 
their older "real" 2GB disk had so many early failures?  I like the 3243, 
but even with it I hear a lot of stories about sudden infant death 
syndrome from other people (who may well not know how they should be 
cooling their disk drives, really).

What kind of write throughput are you seeing on the 'Cuda (I assume it's 
a 2LP 32550, not the older model?)?  I have a weird problem with 
Barracudas, and 2LPs in particular: They read very fast, but I can only 
get about 1.7MB/sec onto them with long writes, through the NetBSD 
filesystem or even around it, directly to the raw device.  If you have a 
lot of them, perhaps you know if there might be some particular reason 
for this.

>My experience with Quantum is more limited.  I eval'ed a Grand Prix a while 
>back, and it was slightly slower than the Seagate, but it was a pretty early 
>unit, so a lot could have changed now that it is in full production.  The 
>Atlas series (which Quantum acquired from DEC) was the worst of the lot, but 
>the eval unit we got was practically wire wrapped.

Is there a 2GB Grand Prix?  I was unaware of that.  I don't know about 
early units, and I know there were some firmware problems a few months ago,
but the 4GB Atlas drives I've tested run really, really cool and quiet, 
are extremely fast -- 9MB/sec! and don't show any evidence of mod wires,
unless they're hidden on the back of the board.  If you haven't tried one 
since they were in their infancy, you might want to give the Atlas 
another shot.

I have no experience with the 2GB Atlas, though I hear generally good 
things about it, and it's pretty cheap.  I might buy one for home.

>All these drives are 7200 RPM disks and can be pretty noisy.  I don't think 
>you will want an array of these drives in the studio itself without a sound 
>enclosure.  Hope this is helpful!

Yeah, natch.  One or two, maybe.  Several, no.  It's like the vacuum pump 
for a really good turntable -- put it in the other room, or it'll make 
the sound worse instead of better. :-)

If you are going to use Micropolis drives, I highly recommend that you go 
with differential cabling.  The termination on the single-ended 3243s I 
have really sucks, to the extent that the documentation says to use "a 
cable-end active terminator" in internal configurations.  Where the hell 
do I get one of _those_? :-)

-- 
Thor Lancelot Simon                                               tls@cloud9.net
 
Don't let your mouth write no check that your tail can't cash.      --Bo Diddley