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From: pae@charon.MIT.EDU (Philip Earnhardt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops
Subject: Re: My experience with the company ASI (Applied Storage Information)
Summary: Warning: You may lose access to your ROM and RAM disks!
Keywords: ASI, T1000SE, SCSI, hard drive
Message-ID: <1990Nov29.000935.1797@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 29 Nov 90 00:09:35 GMT
References: <1990Nov27.203300.6085@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Sender: Phil Earnhardt (onecom!wldrdg!pae)
Distribution: na
Organization: Netwise, Inc.
Lines: 37

In article <1990Nov27.203300.6085@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> pwong@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Patrick Wong) writes:
> [...] Since I am interested
>in getting an external hard dirve for my machine ( With my requirement that
>the connection has to go thru the 100-pin bus connector ....because I do
>not want to loose the parallel port or the serial port), the ASI ad on
>an external SCSI hard drive attracts me.  [...]

A different problem with adding a hard disk to the T1000SE: whether or not
your ROM Dand RAM Disks will be accessible concurrently with the hard disk.

Systems Peripherals Consultants sells 20 and 40Mb drives that connect to the
100 pin connector on the SE. They provide their own BIOS on this connector,
which supercedes the T1000SE's normal BIOS. This new BIOS provides no way
to access the ROM or RAM disks on the SE.

SPC's documentation did not mention this limitation of their product.
After installing it, I voiced my displeasure. They responded that that
"would have involved writing some software to accomplish". Since I was
paying about $700 for a fairly slow 40Mb disk, I had thought such
software would have been included. I have sent the disk back for a
refund.

To be fair, the lack of the ROM and RAM may not be important to all
T1000SE users. For them, this may be a fine product. Personally, I've
decided to buy a regular PC and use LapLink to communicate between
them. The latest version of LapLink has a driver which provides a
redirector--a mechanism to map drive letters to a real physical drive
on the remote system (PC/NFS users are familiar with this concept). This allows
for transparent access of the remote data. This is how I think the SPC drive
*should* work on the T1000SE.

Patrick: SPC now has a SCSI interface (announced at COMDEX). You may want to
check with them and see if it satisfies your needs. SPC's number is (619)
693-8611.

--phil   (onecom!wldrdg!pae)
I speak for myself.