On Thu, 9 May 1996, Peter Kelm wrote:


> > Does this apply to all SCSI devices? EG, I'm trying to decide whether
> > to buy a ZIP drive (which does work) or an EZ drive (which is faster
> > but I'm not sure of netbsd support, tho' other Syquests are supported).
>
> I bought a Zip a month ago. Beside of some quirks (sometimes it freezes
> the machine, but this occurs not often) it works great. I do not know
> about working EZs. But many people I know got many problems with the EZ.

Status on the EZ: waiting.  There is supposed to be a firmware upgrade
very soon, which will correct some problems which, as I understand it, are
the cause of its failure under NetBSD.  The drives really cook under
MacOS, though.  About twice as fast as the ZIP drives, if you believe the
specs.

> And secondly you operate the ZIP like a floppy (in MacOS). No startup
> break (very annoying in _any_ Syquest I have seen until now.

What's a startup break?  Do you mean the time it takes to spin up when
you've stuck a cartridge in?  It's not too bad, it's not much slower than
a hard drive....  It's still way too long if you try to use it like a
floppy drive and swap disks every 3 seconds, though.

First thing if anybody gets an EZ drive, use a formatting program to put a
decent driver on the carts.  The one that comes on the cartridges is
terrible and won't always (ever?) recognize a cartridge after its ejected.
I don't think it always ejects right on reboot, either, but it has been a
long time since I tried.  Get Hard Disk Toolkit.  Its driver _rocks_ on an
EZ135 (or at least the personal edition driver does).

BTW, does anybody know how to force a particular driver to load from a
file on disk at startup for a given SCSI ID even if the drive isn't turned
on?  I tried Mount Everything, which works, but its driver isn't as good.

Oh... and I just noticed... this thread is starting to get off topic,
don't you think....

Cheers,

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