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From: rnf@hobbes.ncsu.edu (Rick Fincher)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: APPLE HIGH SPEED SCSI Vs Ramfast
Message-ID: <1990Oct25.183945.14458@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Date: 25 Oct 90 18:39:45 GMT
References: <8101@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <863@mtune.ATT.COM> <1990Oct24.203500.13274@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> <8162@darkstar.ucsc.edu>
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unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) writes:


>In article <1990Oct24.203500.13274@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> rnf@hobbes.ncsu.edu (Rick Fincher) writes:
>>rkh@mtune.ATT.COM (Robert Halloran) writes:
>>>In article <8101@darkstar.ucsc.edu> unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) writes:
>
	>That's the purpose of a Syquest, giant floppies... I'm most likely
>getting one to use one cartridge for backup and one for the main cartridge
>so I don't ever have to use floppies except for stuff I use so rarely it's
>not worth putting on the cartridge...

That may be YOUR purpose but it is not everyones.

>>RamFast, yet anyway.  If you just want to be able to use it like a
>>regular drive that you can use to boot a particular cartridge or for backing
>>up another hard drive, it works fine.

>	Ok.. Picky picky...

>	Having a Syquest without being able to change drives is like me
>giving you a floppy drive and saying you can never switch floppies. 
>Whoopie?!  The only use of a Syquest over a standard hard drive is its
>removability.. (as Syquest based drives are usually at LEAST a little
>bit slower than fast regular hard drives).

The need to change out 40 meg chunks of disk storage is far less than
the need to change out 140K or 800K chunks of disk storage. 

With a regular drive you get X megs, period.  With a removable you get
unlimited megs in 40 meg chunks.  You can also use the drive on multiple
machines, ie you can have a ProDOS, MS-Dos and Mac cartridge and carry
the drive from one machine to the other when needed.

If you want to use it like a floppy be advised that letting one
cartridge spin down, removing it, inserting the new cartridge, letting
it spin up to speed takes about a minute and a half.  If you don't have
gobs of ram it is slower than backing up to floppies. If you do have
gobs of ram you can make a big RAM disk, copy a chunk of stuff to it,
remove the old cartridge and insert the new one and warm boot (takes
about 15 seconds with RamFast), then copy the contents of the RAM disk
to the new cartridge.

>-- 
>/               Apple II(GS) Forever!    unknown@ucscb.ucsc.edu               \

Rick Fincher
rnf@catt.ncsu.edu