CompuServe Messages

Hayden, I had a fascinating experience this week with my older, Mitsumi 002 drive, and it's a story you should hear. The 002 is the older drive in Mitsumi's lineup, with an eight-bit interface card. It has the reputation of a moderate performer, only usable because it's very inexpensive, costing less than $200 in most cases. Wanting to learn about CD-ROMs, but not wishing to spend too much money, I purchased an 002 drive bundled with four shareware discs for $250. As expected, I got only moderate performance from the drive at best, with the CDTA and MPC Wizard test programs showing many cases where the drive's data transfer rate was no better than half of the MPC standard of 150 KB/second. I wasn't disappointed, since I hadn't expected much. I had intended to use the Mitsumi 002 drive as a starting point, planning to purchase a high-performance drive later this year. Then, I had an unrelated PC problem that damaged the motherboard on my 33-MHz '386 built-from-parts clone. That led me to purchase a new mother board, replacing the old system board, its 1991 AMI BIOS and 64 KB cache with a board carrying a 256 KB cache and a 1992 AMI BIOS. The CPU, 8 MB of SIMMS, accessory cards and drives were the same. carried over from the old machine. Only the motherboard and case were new. [More]