From: Randal Whittle (rwhittle_at_usa.net)
Date: Wed Jan 06 1999 - 19:00:11 EST
At 12:36 AM 1/7/99 +0100, you wrote:
>About the ultrabay internal zip drive. What speeds do you get on those as
>compared to the
>internal HD. I have the paralell port variant and its pretty slow, but very
In short: Its a lot faster than the parallel port version. Have you ever
used the SCSI version of the Zip on a machine? If you have, you know the
speed difference is like night and day. This internal zip is no less
(pardon the pun) zippy than the SCSI version I have at my desktop.
No, don't expect it to be HD speed, but I would find it compareable to a
CD-ROM at about...oh...8x speed. Maybe 12x. Don't quote me. :-) I'm
sure there are data transfer rate specs somewhere for the Zip that will
allow you a more exact comparison. But personally, I find 12X speed in a
CD Drive to be perfectly adequate. My TP 600 CD is 20x or 24x (I guess its
more like 12 - 24x, depending on where it is reading on the disc). On my
desktop PC, I have a 2-year old 12x CD drive along with another 16x drive.
I don't notice the difference between any of these drives. I'm sure
there's something you could measure, but its irrelevant to me in actual
usage. I won't go out of my way to get one of those silly 40x drives.
>You who have the ultrabay internal zip can you just put a bunch of
>applications (oh well 1 or two per disk with todays software) and just run
>them from the disk without transfering to the HD. This might be something to
>warrant a purchase
Would I want to run applications off of it? I could, but personally, I'd
rather not. I have used my internal zip to run some AVI files as a demo,
and it worked OK for that. But generally speaking, I don't use the Zip for
applications. I use it exclusively to transfer files and archive data (or
apps). I'm generally not interested in installing an application to a
removable drive since, just to run it, I need to make sure I put that disk
in. I did that for more than a few years when I had an Atari 800 and then
a HP 150 Touchscreen. It was around 1990 that I finally owned a computer
with a hard drive and I don't play the floppy-based application swap game
anymore since then. :-)
- Randy Whittle
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu Jan 23 2003 - 09:54:38 EST