SyQuest 270
14 messages in this thread
Has anyone here purchased one of the new SyQuest 270 meg drives yet? If
so, what are your impressions so far concerning speed, cartridge
durability, etc. The SCSI drives are selling for about $399 mail order,
with carts at about $82 so it sounds like a pretty good $$/megabyte ratio.
// John (Speeding on the Information Superhighway)
\X/ Mercury@ins.infonet.net
I saw one of them for the first time at CompuUSA but they only the IDE version
and if I recall, the Amiga had some problems with the IDE Syquest and even
Syquest themselves (tech support) recommend going with the SCSI version if you
want to avoid some headaches. Catya,
Well the SyQuest 270 I'm thinking about getting is the SCSI version, and I
already have been using their SyQuest-44 on my 4091 controller, so I don't
anticipate any problems. The thing I'm mainly concerned about is if their
cartridges are more reliable than they use to be. Although the SyQuest-44
has been a workhorse, a couple of the SyQuest carts have a lot of bad
blocks on them.
// John (Speeding on the Information Superhighway)
\X/ Mercury@ins.infonet.net
I was looking at those 270 meg SyQuests myself. They sound fantastic
if they work the way they are supposed to.
Well apparently not too many people have the SyQuest-270 yet, I guess they
are in short supply. I went over to the MAC forums to see if anyone is
talking about it, and only 1 person on the forum posted a message saying
they had one, and he was very pleased with it so far. I guess nobody in
the Amiga section here has one yet, so I guess I get to be the first one
on the block <g>. I went ahead and ordered the SCSI internal and it should
be here on Monday. I'll let you know what happens!
// John (Speeding on the Information Superhighway)
\X/ Mercury@ins.infonet.net
By all means, please post a report as to how good the SyQuest 270 is!
By the way, where did you order it from?
Well the SyQuest-270 came today, but I wasn't home when Fedex delivered
it….ARGHHH <g>. So I made arrangements to have it delivered at work
tomorrow so should know soon enough how well it will work out. I ordered
the drive from Dirt Cheap (DC) drives out of Texas. They are in almost
every month of Computer Shopper.
// John (Speeding on the Information Superhighway)
\X/ Mercury@ins.infonet.net
Okay, John. By now you shoould've used the 270 SyQuest. What's the
verdict!
Boy, you guys are vultures <g>. I haven't even got it installed yet! But
hold on, I'll finish this message with the early verdict.
Well it took me a little longer than I thought to get the darn thing
working. Seems like the SyQuest-270 is a little less tolerant of SCSI bus
noise than my other drives, including the old SyQuest-44. Once I shortened
up the SCSI cables a little bit, it started working just fine. Here is the
Diskspeed results of the drive, using 35 buffers and no other caching:
.MKSoft DiskSpeed 4.0 – Copyright C 1989-91 MKSoft Development
.————————————————————-
.CPU: 68040 OS Version: 40.68 Normal Video DMA
.Device: SY1: Buffers: 35
.Comments: DiskSpeed 4.1
.
.CPU Speed Rating: 3104
.
.Testing directory manipulation speed.
.File Create: 35 files/sec | CPU Available: 64%
.File Open: 72 files/sec | CPU Available: 38%
.Directory Scan: 209 files/sec | CPU Available: 45%
.File Delete: 136 files/sec | CPU Available: 39%
.
.Seek/Read: 71 seeks/sec | CPU Available: 81%
.
.Testing with a 512 byte buffer. (LONG-aligned, MEMF_FAST)
.Create file: 29781 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 82%
.Write to file: 29699 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 83%
.Read from file: 112789 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 47%
.
.Testing with a 4096 byte buffer. (LONG-aligned, MEMF_FAST)
.Create file: 106469 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 90%
.Write to file: 111129 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 91%
.Read from file: 622592 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 58%
.
.Testing with a 32768 byte buffer. (LONG-aligned, MEMF_FAST)
.Create file: 296855 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 90%
.Write to file: 347551 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 92%
.Read from file: 1291108 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 78%
.
.Testing with a 262144 byte buffer. (LONG-aligned, MEMF_FAST)
.Create file: 604458 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 90%
.Write to file: 857925 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 95%
.Read from file: 1741177 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 92%
So there you have it Leslie. I'll send you a follow up in a couple of
weeks on it's operation if you haven't already purchased one <g>.
// John (Speeding on the Information Superhighway)
\X/ Mercury@ins.infonet.net
-> Boy, you guys are vultures <g>.
And the bad part is that I'm PROUD of it! <g> Seriously, thanks a lot
for info. I assume you bought the external version. What kind of cable
did you use to hook it up? I called Dirt Cheap Drives and they said they
sold the external version with internal cabling.(?) By the way, what
computer/SCSI card are you using and does it have an external connector?
(I promise I'll shut up and go away soon. <g>)
"And the bad part is that I'm PROUD of it! <g> Seriously, thanks a lot
for info."
No problem Leslie, glad to be of some help.
"I assume you bought the external version."
See what happens when you make assumptions? 8^) No, I bought the internal
version. I already have a nice tower case that I turned into my SCSI drive
workstation, so installed it in there.
"What kind of cable did you use to hook it up?"
Since I'm using the 4091 SCSI-II controller, I use a high density DB-50 to
Centronics-50 connector to go between the 4091 and my SCSI tower. In the
tower, all drives are connected using 1 inline 50 pin SCSI cable that has
5 or 6 connectors on it.
"I called Dirt Cheap Drives and they said they sold the external version
with internal cabling.(?)"
Probably what they mean is that the external case has SCSI pass-through
connectors, but it's also connected to the drive internally.
"By the way, what computer/SCSI card are you using and does it have an
external connector?"
See above <g>.
// John (Speeding on the Information Superhighway)
\X/ Mercury@ins.infonet.net
John,
Ref the "bad blocks" on some of the SyQuest-44 carts…..as I recall one
of the commercial HD backup programmes had a version of the USA Govt
formatting in it that fixed this problemm. You had to do the reformat
three times to clean-up the carts.
Laurie Carroll AKL NZ
Longdistance Autopilot
I remember reading that somewhere myself, I believe it was Quaterback
Tools that had the special USA Govt erase. But I'm kinda sceptical about
that claim. If the block is bad, then I don't see how a special erasure
could help much, but I guess you never know.
// John (Speeding on the Information Superhighway)
\X/ Mercury@ins.infonet.net
John,
Actually it wasn't our claim. A number of users have reported that drives that
started showing bad blocks would respond to a very deep level of the Gov't
Erase. I'm not conviced that a low level format shouldn't do the same thing.
The govt erase writes alternating data paterns with each successive pass to
remove any latent data on the drive.
Randy Brooks
Central Coast Software
A division of New Horizons Software, Inc.