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From: lairdt@mist.CS.ORST.EDU (Tom Laird)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: CMS 60/120MB tape drives
Message-ID: <1991Feb13.021614.13426@lynx.CS.ORST.EDU>
Date: 13 Feb 91 02:16:14 GMT
References: <26853@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <173@cf_su20.cf_su10.Sbi.COM>
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Organization: Computer Science Department, Oregon State Univ.
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I have had a CMS 60/120 for over two an a half years now, and have had
no problems with it at all.  I do have some comments reguarding this idea
that a simple three connector cable will allow you to use two floppies and
the CMS drive.  It will not.  There is no guarantee that this cable will
actually work in your system.  I have the card in my system, and not
only does it make transfer faster than the simple cable, but it eliminates
conflicts which occur with some hard drive controller cards (such as 
Perstor ARLL) - the card doesn't cost that much in addition, and if 
ordered with the external kit, will allow you to move your CMS drive to
another system easily.

As for the transfer rate, I get 2.5 meg on long backups/restores of 20 megs
or more on a tape with no other archives (longer time if others exist).
I do not use the compression, since it's slower, creates more wear'n'tear on
the dc2000 tapes, and most of the bigger blocks of my files are for my bbs
archives (or similar) and they are zipped anyway (which is better compression).


I like the drive.  It has made collection files very easy, and get rid of 
piles of disks from my computer area.  the only drawback it has now
is that I need a drive with bigger capacity and faster throughput to backup
my larger drives.