From: utzoo!watmath!watcgl!dmmartindale
Newsgroups: net.micro
Title: Re: 5.25 inch hard disks
Article-I.D.: watcgl.428
Posted: Thu May 19 12:16:53 1983
Received: Fri May 20 01:22:06 1983
References: <1355@sri-arpa.UUCP>

For someone suggesting that 380Mbyte 5.25 inch disks will make the
14 inch drives obsolete:  Hang on a minute.
Does this little drive have the same sort of seek times as a large drive?
The large Winchesters (Fujitsu, Ampex, DEC) have access times that are
equal to or shorter than the best of the removable-pack large disks,
and higher data transfer rates.  (The RA81 is 28ms average seek, for
example).  All of the small winchesters I've seen are slower.
The number of seeks that can be done per second is very important to
the performance of the multi-user systems that disks like the large
Winchesters are installed on, and unless the little disks can match them
in they they won't replace the large disks.
Besides, if you have the technology to build a 5 inch drive with 380 Mb,
why not use it to build a 1 Gb 14 inch drive?