Summary of SyQuest drive responses

[Jim Chandler]

A while back I ask about the SyQuest drives under ESIX for my 386 box at
home.  I have a Dell 310 with the Adaptec 1542A.  I was looking for ways
to back up my Miniscribe 9380S (330 Meg) HD.  Here are the responses that
I have received.  I decided to purchase the Syquest drive and got it from
Hard Drives International for $380.  The cartridges are $79 each.  So far it
seems to work great under ESIX.  I have not tried it under DOS yet and 
probably won't use it there.  It mounts as a standard HD.  SyQuest has a bbs
at 415-656-0473 which answer questions and has programs and drivers for the
drive under numerous platform.  Thanks to Joe at SyQuest for answering all my
questions.  I am very pleased with the drive so far.  I would recommend it as
an alternative to tape.
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My wife and I use them on Macs. They are great, sturdy, but you'll want
either two drives or enough free space somewhere else that you can copy
44 meg on to it, so you can do disk to disk copies.  Feel free to ask me
questions.
-- 
-- David Phillip Oster - Note new signature. Old one has gone Bye Bye.
-- oster at well.sf.ca.us = {backbone}!well!oster

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My experiences are DOS-based, but...

Syquests ARE the greatest thing since sliced bread, if you use care.  Do you
know the warning on CDs that say with proper care they will last forever?
Well, I've got 50 of 'em that are already trashed.  Syquests are the same.

With a syquest, you *MUST* wait until the drive spins down before you pull
the disk.  There is *NO* interlock preventing you from ripping it out of the
drive while the heads are still on the platter.  We have had multiple clients
who complain that their disks have just "gone bad" inexplicably.  A surface
test using norton determines streaks of bad sectors, one for each head.
The worst part is that it probably trashed the drive.

I wish I had one for home use so that I could use it for games, backups, etc.
also.  But ask yourself:  How do you back up a syquest?  If you don't have
two drives or 40 meg available on your hard disk subsystem, you're SOL. :-(

The only experience I have had with bernoulli drives are the 8" monsters.
They were 10 and 20 meg cartridges.  If the 5.25" versions are anything like
the 8" ones, STAY AWAY AT ALL COSTS!  They are slow, bulky, slow, unreliable,
slow, you couldn't mix the 10 and 20 meg cartridges, slow...

I think you get the picture.

I hope this helps!

Josh Muskovitz
Computer Design, Inc.

josh at uunet!cditi

Disclaimer:  My employer doesn't even appro-  >ack<  [message terminated]
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I had one here at ISC for a while a couple of years ago to see if it'd work
with our HPDD and an Adaptec 1542 SCSI board.  The answer -- yes, but...
There were some problems early on in that the drives came configured to
use 256-byte sectors (there's now a hack in the HPDD to support this, sigh).
It took us quite a while to get any program that would change this (Roy
Neese had his SCSI config program available on 'adaptex' but that seems to
be gone, these days).  ISC Unix currently doesn't support removable SCSI
disk media.  This will (I think) change in the next upgrade release (2.3?,
2.2.1? who knows?).  Right now you can only use the cartridge that is in
the machine and spun up when the system inits.  They seem to work, though.
I talked to some people who were having trouble with them in harsher-than-
normal-office environments.  They don't do a real good cleaning and air
purge of the cartridges when you load them, so airborne contaminants can
cause problems.  Oh yeah, one more thing.  When doing multi sector transfers,
the SyQuest drives ONLY disconnect from the SCSI bus when they have to change
cylinders!  This completely kills performance on any other SCSI devices
on the bus.  A major bugaboo, and the SyQuest people I talked to a couple
of years ago had NO plans to change this behavior.

Please let me know what kinds of things you get back, especially concerning
the Bernoulli boxes; I've never tried one and I'm curious.
Thanx,
DLP

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I own a SyQuest SQ-555 44M REMOVABLE hard drive.... and IT IS THE
NEATEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD!  Well that's it in a nutshell...

	I own the SyQuest as do 2 of my friends.  We are all very happy
with our purchases.  The drives are fast.  They seem to be reliable...
knock on wood.  I, myself, own 2 cartridges (SQ-400's).  I think it is a
super advantage to be able to buy 44Megs of FAST storage for around $79!

	As I said 2 of my friends have SyQuests also, and we are often
at each other's houses with our cartridges...  Between the 3 of us we
have 7 cartridges and (obviously) 3 drives.  All of the cartridges are
100% compatible in all 3 drives.  I think this says something about the
SyQuest.  It works just like a 44Meg FLOPPY!

	One note, you will need a device driver if you intend on
swapping cartridges "On the fly."  That is without rebooting.  I believe
that SyQuest has this available for IBM's.  (At least it says so in
their instruction manual.)  My SyQuest (and my friends) are running on
our ATARI ST computers.  We have a device driver which allows us to swap
disks on the fly.  It is truly like using super fast floppies.

	If you have any other questions, please feel free to e-mail me.

Hope this helps,
Jim Tauberg
jimmy at unix.cis.pitt.edu

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I am using the SyQuest 44 meg removable hard drive under Rev D.
I don't know about a 44 meg "floppy"

---
Jeff Ellis		ESIX SYSTEM/V  UUCP:uunet!zardoz!everex!jde
			US Mail: 1923 St. Andrew Place, Santa Ana, CA 92705
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-- 
Jim Chandler
asuvax!xroads!beagle!chandler
chandler at beagle.UUCP