WTB: High speed Floppy
baw2
I do most of my work on floppies so if anyone has anything that will
speed up the read/write/access of a 1.44 3.5 floppy then I am intersted.
I work in law, and I keep all my documents on floppies so a faster
floppy would speed up my computer more than anything else.
baw2
Sergey Zhupanov
baw2 <ba...@ra.msstate.edu> wrote:
>I do most of my work on floppies so if anyone has anything that will
>speed up the read/write/access of a 1.44 3.5 floppy then I am intersted.
>I work in law, and I keep all my documents on floppies
It all depends on how much $$ you have to spend. If you have $350 down
and $10/disk, you can get an Olympus or Fujitsu 230 Mb Magneto Optical
Drive that would have the the following advantages:
(1) Disk size: 230 Mb (compared to 1.44 Mb floppies you use now)
(2) Write speed is about 5 time faster. Read speed is as fast as hard
drive
(3) Media reliability is incomparably higher in that it is much less
susceptible to:
(a) temperature changes
(b) magnetic influence from near-by devices
(c) physical damage
(4) Relatively painless installation and use, compared to other removable
media
Since you are in law, I presume that $$ is not a problem, and that
advantage #3 is significant. I would advice against the likes of Zip
or EZ-135 drive in your case, since they also use magnetic media, similar
to the floppies.
Hope this helps,
Thanks,
sergey
----------------------------------
Email: ser...@cis.ohio-state.edu
baw2
I want to read existing floppies faster. Any suggestions?
Todd Warnock
Check out the web site at www.corpsys.com. I've bought stuff from
them before - they have a catalog, a building, and are extremely
reputable. The sell something called an X10 Fastcache Floppy. Here's
a writeup...
(I have no ties to them except as a very satisfied customer...)
Good luck!
Todd
(article follows)
Accelerated Floppy Drives Hit Market
New Technology Improves Floppy Speeds
Corporate Systems Center (CSC), a leading Silicon Valley research and
development firm, has announced the release of the X10 floppy disk
drive, signaling the first significant improvement in PC floppy drives
in over 14 years. The new X10 drive and its proprietary controller
function reliably at speeds 10 times faster than conventional 3.5"
drives.
"This new X10 technology is definitely cutting edge." Bob Rosenbloom,
a leading disk drive engineer agrees, "While processor and CD-ROM
speeds are light years ahead of their original performance, floppy
drives still operate at 286 performance levels."
Rosenbloom is right. Standard 1.44MB floppy drives still operate at
the same speeds (300RPM and 500Kbits/sec) as they did in the original
IBM AT. It takes well over one minute to duplicate a full 1.44MB
floppy disk in standard drives.
X-10 data transfer rates are similar to those of the popular IOMEGA
Zip drive, but the X-10 does not require special media. Ordinary 720K
and 1.44MB diskettes are used in the X-10. Much of the X-10's
performance boost is due to faster motors and Simultaneous Double
Sided technology. This technology allows both sides of a disk to be
written to or read from at the same time. Although this technology has
been used for some time in high speed disk duplicators, CSC is the
first company to use it in standard PC applications. Additional
performance gains are derived from the on-board microprocessor which
reads the entire floppy disk into a 1.5MB DRAM cache memory located on
the controller card. Subsequent requests for data from the disk are
served by the cache, which has a 0.3ms access time.
The X-10 is designed to replace high end disk duplicators, and is able
to copy typical disks in as little as 5 seconds. Typical disks are not
completely filled with data, and the controller's on-board
microprocessor provides the intelligence to skip over blank areas on
the disk.
"Standard floppy drives are dinosaurs.", adds Rosebloom. The X10 boots
faster than a hard drive and is totally compatible with the billions
of floppy disks already out there."
The X-10 also features a motorized disk eject system similar to the
one popularized on the Apple Macintosh. Disks can be automatically
ejected after duplication, or the user can click a Windows icon to
eject the media.
The X-10 is targeted at dealers and system builders manufacturing high
end Pentium Pro machines. The X-10 is also expected to impact the
market for disk duplicators. The X-10 accelerated floppy drive retails
for $149 and is currently shipping to system integrators at under $100
in larger volumes. Contact Lisa Rayfield at Corporate Systems Center
(408) 743-8782 or WWW.CORPSYS.COM for more information. baw2
computers
baw2 <ba...@ra.msstate.edu> wrote:
>I do most of my work on floppies so if anyone has anything that will
>speed up the read/write/access of a 1.44 3.5 floppy then I am intersted.
>I work in law, and I keep all my documents on floppies so a faster
>floppy would speed up my computer more than anything else.
Get a caching controller.
Dee
www.cybersoftsystems.com Internet Solutions, Computers, Networks
615-742-4815 Internet solutions
615-831-5596 Computers & Networks
615-831-9973 Fax
A Cyrix,Supermicro, Amptron and Microsoft products authorized source.
Special : Amptron 8800 VX motherboard w/ 256k 686 P166+ cpu $259
Bruce
I have 4 Sony 3020 tapes (850mb native/1700mb compressed) for sale -
used for 1 month only. Asking $22.00.
Shane Vaughn
Caching controller won't speed up floppy access. Read and write are still
slower than sludge. A couple of years ago, a company put out a combination
tape drive/1.44 floppy drive. Just as a side note, and hardly mentioned was
the fact that they had doubled the floppy speed (which is actually very easy to
do on the hardware level). I forget the company, but they were probably the
only company putting out tape/floppy drives. I think it was a 350MB backup.
-shane.
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