Followup: Warp SCSI installation

[cph@martigny.ai.mit.edu (Chris Hanson)]

   Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 11:28:59 +0100
   From: kress@ctpsun.ciw.edu (Victor Kress)

   People considering this move should know that this configuration is not
   very fast.  It is faster than a floppy, but *much* slower than even a slow
   hard-disk.  I got the SCSI because I wanted speed (and I expect to get a CD
   at some point).

FYI, my experience with the Zip drive under OS/2 is that it is _very_
slow.  I believe this has nothing to do with the drive, or whether it
is SCSI vs. parallel, but is almost entirely a problem with the OS/2
disk driver.  The real problem is that the FAT disk cache is not used
for removable devices -- obvious, when you consider that a floppy
could be ejected at any moment -- and that access to the FAT file
system is quite slow without a cache.  I am able to get similar
miserable performance out of this drive under DOS when I disable the
disk cache.

In contrast, DOS with a cache has very reasonable performance.  Linux
is even better, but Linux has particularly effective disk caching
integrated into the kernel, so it's not quite fair to compare it to
the other systems.