Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!wuarchive!decwrl!shelby!agate!darkstar!ucscb.UCSC.EDU!unknown From: unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2 Subject: Re: APPLE HIGH SPEED SCSI Vs Ramfast Message-ID: <8201@darkstar.ucsc.edu> Date: 26 Oct 90 06:55:52 GMT References: <1990Oct24.203500.13274@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> <8162@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <1990Oct25.183945.14458@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> Sender: usenet@darkstar.ucsc.edu Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz; Open Access Computing Lines: 33 In article <1990Oct25.183945.14458@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> rnf@hobbes.ncsu.edu (Rick Fincher) writes: >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. > >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. Well, on the 45 meg cartridge drive that I borrowed for a weekend a few months ago (PLI brand, but is based on/uses the Syquest mechanism like I think all 45 meg cartridge drives), it took more like 30 seconds to switch drives... at most... I could be wrong, but it seemed a looot faster than the huge amounts of time other people had said it would take.. (and yes, I did wait for it to completely stop, or else I'd've ripped off the heads!) Also, with nearly the minimum bootable Finder I could put on it, it still took ~30 seconds to boot I think.. or maybe it was with a few DAs... Whatever, it wasn't with a huge system with tons of fonts or anything.. This was on Apple's DMA card too, and yes I had the special SCSI tools in... Just seemed kind of slow! But then again, I couldn't find any programs that would let me change the interleave.. -- / Apple II(GS) Forever! unknown@ucscb.ucsc.edu \ \"If cartoons were meant for adults, they'd be on in prime time."-Lisa Simpson/