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From: jdb@reef.cis.ufl.edu (Brian K. W. Hook)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: Plus Hardcard II XL - 9ms
Keywords: Plus, Hardcard, 9ms
Message-ID: <27581@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU>
Date: 22 Mar 91 20:55:18 GMT
References: <1991Mar21.015651.23998@unixg.ubc.ca> <31813@mimsy.umd.edu> <1991Mar22.082158.14390@agate.berkeley.edu>
Sender: news@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU
Organization: UF CIS Dept.
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An article in _PC Sources_ just slammed the Hardcard for nigh near
fraudulent advertising....first off:

It is 9ms PERCEIVED ACCESS TIME....PERCEIVED being the operative word.  I
would like to inform you folks the my ST277R with NCACHE-F and 2MB of cache
has a perceived access time of .4ms....that's right -- point 4.  00.4 ms

The drive itself PHYSICALLY has an actual track to track average seek
time of 17ms, which is nothing to sneeze at, but far from the 9ms.
Benchmarks that were run on it vs. a 40MB Seagate IDE drive put it at about
5% faster on a the DOS Large Records benchmark, and it was not
significantly faster than the Seagate in any other areas.

I was impressed at the ads at first, but they are strictly ads and you have
to take them with a grain of salt.  While it is an impressive technological
achievement otherwise, you can pick up a a good and fast 83MB IDE drive for
around 380 dollars, then throw in 1MB of RAM for 50 bucks, and you have a
drive that costs 430 dollars with a 1MB cache...cache that can be allocated
to another program if it is required.

Brian