CompuServe Messages

Chris: I've been using an Insite 3.5" 21-meg floptical with an Amiga 2500/30 for about two years. It installed like a charm, since it hooked right up to the Amiga's internal SCSI controller, which already was handling two conventional hard drives (thanks to SCSI's seven-device capability). I just had to be sure to configure the SCSI terminators properly and inform the system that I had a new removeable-media SCSI drive on board. Also, my Amiga had an empty 3.5" drive bay and the internal Insite model fit perfectly. I know some observers consider the 21-meg floptical standard outdated and slow by today's standards. For instance, many Amiga users who are into high-quality graphics and animation work and who need to store huge data files prefer Syquest-type drives, which are faster and more capacious. Nevertheless, the 21-meg flopticals are inexpensive (around $13 each in quantity purchase), easy to store and transport, reasonably tough, and quite adequate for most of my own storage purposes. The biggest problem: Making sure you store and label them so they are distinct from your ordinary 3.5-inch diskettes. By employing disk compression software (DiskExpander for the Amiga, in my case), you can effectively double the carrying capacity of the floptical to around 40 megabytes, which is quite adequate for many uses. In terms of read/write performance the floptical drive is, in fact, relatively slow (in between a normal Amiga diskette drive and, perhaps, a slow SCSI or IDE hard drive). But in most cases, when accessing small- or medium-size files I do not find the floptical's relative lack of speed that noticeable. I use flopticals mainly for backing up my conventional Amiga hard disks. The Insite drive is much faster and more efficient than backing up to floppies, and cheaper than using a tape drive. Plus I can choose to format the flopticals using the standard AmigaDOS file structure, so using standard directory tools I can access my backups fairly quickly and more easily verify them. I also load from floptical some special applications that are big and which I only use occasionally, so the Insite's modest read time isn't a big concern to me. I also use flopticals to store archived programs and texts, hypertext help and document files for my applications. On the Amiga I can easily configure applications to call for particular flopticals carrying their on-line help files. Also, note that my floptical drive serves as half a dozen different drives in one: * It also handles ordinary 1.44 meg, high-density diskettes and so serves as a second Amiga diskette drive (however, it won't read 880K dual-density Amiga floppies). * Since later versions of the Amiga operating system can format, read and write to MS-DOS disks, the Insite floptical drive gives me a convenient way to exchange data files with PCs via 1.44-meg diskettes. * Installed on my Amiga is a "Bridgeboard," which lets me multitask a virtual 486 PC on the system. Using Commodore-supplied software utilities, I can access the floptical drive for MS-DOS hard disk storage or for PC-side backups. * Similarly, via my Amiga's Macintosh emulator (I'm using Readysoft's A-Max II+) I can use the floptical as a hard drive for the Macintosh side of the system. The Mac desktop (running under A-Max) will directly access the floptical, formatting 21-meg diskettes as removeable hard drives. [By the way, Insite's technical support (the few times I needed it) has been outstanding. For Amiga use, the drive is exactly the same as those sold for PCs, except that a special chip is added; however, I'm told by other Amiga users that with software utilities an ordinary, PC-configured floptical drive can be employed.]