Re: Zip for ThinkPad's

["Paul Khoury" <pkhoury@loop.com>]

On Sun, 21 Sep 1997 17:01:18 -0700 (PDT), Steve Parker wrote:

>On Sun, 21 Sep 1997, Paul Khoury wrote:
>> >I've contemplated just running an external 3.5 gig hard drive, via parallel
>> >port.  Anyone doing so already?
>> 
>> And for anyone who is doing that, or running other parallel port
>> devices, are they really slow?  I would only expect 8-bit speed, as
>> the parallel port is only 8 bit anyways.
>
>  I have a 1GB Quantum fireball 1080 [one of the fastest 1GB drives ever]

How fast, how much cache, and most importantly, SCSI or (I would guess) EIDE?  The
drive I would like to use is a Quantum Prodrive LPS525s, but because it is a SCSI-2
device, I would need to fork out almost $200 for a decent SCSI-2 PCMCIA card
to benefit from the 10.8ms and 512K cache.  Right now it's on an Ultra Wide
card in my server.

>stuck in an external parallel port case.  I can get about 670K/sec
>throughput, *but* my TP560-120 can barely do anything else while that is
>going on.  It is so slow it hurts.  Really hurts.  The parallel interface
>manufacturer claims the interface can do up to 700K/sec, so I am basically
>right at the limit.

Maybe their test machine was a Pentium II 233MHz or something.
Right now, I just do things the cheap way - with a Laplink cable from
OS/2's "Boot from Drive A:" option.  I'd say that it takes about 18-20 seconds to
copy a 1.5MB file from my 701's HD to the Quantum drive.

  If I slow down my parallel port the CPU load goes
>down, but so does the throughput.
>
What is the setting of your parallel port (SPP, ECP, EPP)?

>> Also, does anyone know if these devices are compatible with higher
>> end OSes such as OS/2 and various unixes?
>
>  My case/parallel adapter supports Windows/DOS/Win95 and OS/2.  The case
>was $45 or so, so I can live with its shortcomings.
>
>============================================================================
>==== Steve Parker ==== San Luis Obispo, CA ==== Multi-OS & Multitasking ====
>============================================================================
>
>
Later,

Paul