hardw: OnStream 30GB 'floppy'-drive !!!

[Paul Dufresne]

On Tue, Aug 24, 1999 at 05:05:31PM -0500, Nick Shaffner wrote:
> Hehe, too bad these are tape drives and can only xfer 7 gig an hour - that'd
> be a long install time :)
> 
If transfer speed is 1Mb/s like I seem to read on the photo of the box,
that means it can only transfer 3600Mb/hour or 3.5Gb/hour.
Why did you double?

I was feeling stupid to have taken a tape drive for what was looking
almost as fast as a HD, so I decided to do simple benchmark on my
computer, saying to myself it was time I know a bit about relative
speed of floppy, hard drive, and this new product.

My computer:
486DX-33MHz,
HD: 4.3Gb Fujitsu MPD3043AT
Very old ISA IDE controller (multi-IO card)
Old 1.44Mb floppy drive (same multi-IO card)

Files used to test speed:
Netscape 4.6 for Unix: 9 769 498 bytes
lesourd-Divulg.zip:    1 449 480 bytes

I used time to time different commands:
cp Netscape testspeed: 22.46s (424k/s)
mcopy a:lesourd testspeed: 49s (28.9k/s)  [45s with cp on a mounted floppy]

OnStream [tape backup???]: if 1Mb/s then 1024k/s

So if this is a tape backup, then it would be able to transfer stuff
2.5 times faster than my hard disk on MY COMPUTER. This looks fast
to me!

And my floppy drive would be about 15X slower than my hard disk.

Now I admit, my computer is a snail.



Paul Dufresne