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From: phco@ecsvax.UUCP (John Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: hh hd's in a z-150
Message-ID: <3871@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-Sep-87 16:37:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.3871
Posted: Wed Sep 16 16:37:10 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 24-Sep-87 04:28:44 EDT
References: <255@auscso.UUCP> <3838@ecsvax.UUCP> <336@auscso.UUCP>
Reply-To: phco@ecsvax.UUCP (John Miller)
Organization: Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lines: 31

In article <336@auscso.UUCP> johnk@auscso.UUCP (John Knutson) writes:
>In article <3838@ecsvax.UUCP> phco@ecsvax.UUCP (John Miller) writes:
>>would need two floppy drives when there's a hard disk installed, though.
>
>First, my machine originally came with the two floppies.  Second, i'd
>like to see YOU put 73 megs or more worth of floppies onto a 20meg HD.
>I have over 200 floppies (200*360*1024=~73megs) so there's no WAY one hd
>isn't going to do any good.  besides, even if i only had one floppy, the
>main reason for getting the hd in the first place was to have the extra
>storage and the extra drive for applications that require much more than
>I've got.

I don't quite get your point.  Obviously, you're not going to get all
of your 73 megs on one 20meg HD.  You're not going to get them in two
floppy drives simultaneously, either.

My point was that, if you have a hard disk, your most likely situation
would be to have programs and data residing on the hard disk and then use a
floppy drive for importing and exporting programs and/or data.  Having
two floppies makes it slightly easier to copy one floppy to another,
but if you regularly need to use a hard disk AND TWO floppies, it sounds
like you probably need a larger hard disk or another hard disk instead
of the second floppy drive.  Floppy disk i/o is so slow in comparison to
hard disk i/o that it makes little sense to use floppies for any disk
intensive work.  Better yet, use a battery-backed-up ram disk for routine 
mass storage and a removable cartridge for archival purposes.

-- 
                        John Miller  (ecsvax!phco)
                        Dept. of Pharmacology, Univ. of N.C.-Chapel Hill
                        Chapel Hill, NC 27514       (919) 966-4343