From: magus@drktowr.chi.il.us (Louis Giliberto)
Newsgroups: comp.os.coherent
Subject: Re: Colorado Systems - Conversation
Date: 9 Jan 93 17:59:02 GMT
Organization: DarkTower Software
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL7]

From way back when:

Richard Threlkeld (rjt@softin.lonestar.org) wrote:
: I have the CMS Jumbo 250 with the hardware controller card.  This is available
: with hardware compression or without.  Without, it is cheap.  Either of them 

I walked into CompUSA and they had them for $279 w/out controller card
so I broke down and bought one.  I'm using it temporarily with this
secondary DOS system I have, but the real reason I bought it was for
Coherent.

I'd like to get the controller card, but before I spend more money,
does anyone know if the driver MWC is going to write will be for
floppy controller, harware controller (Colorado's), or the Trakker
Parallel drive?  It'd be cool if they did all three, but that's
a bit much to expect.

The darn piece of XXXX card I have now is an old Western Digital controller
card that they actually warn you about in the Colorado manual.  As soon
as I put the tape drive in, I started getting cache memory errors.  It's
an MFM controller and really slow.  I gave the cache a wait state, and 
that stopped the errors, but my system slowed down quite a bit.  The
floppy controller in my Coh_Box is an IDE so it should work better. (I
know floppy is neither MFM or IDE, but the controller type does make
a difference).

I brought this up because of the discussion about SCSI vs. Floppy
tape drives a while back.  I thought about it, and bought the Floppy
and here's why:

Even if I switch to SCSI, there will be a floppy controller since
I only use Intel machines at home, so I can still use the tape drive.
If I don't, I can still use it no matter what drive I have since I
will always have a floppy drive whether my controller is IDE, SCSI,
ESDI, MFM, etc.  I can move it from machine to machine easier and
at lower cost since an IDE controller is like $20.  If my SCSI 
controller goes, it's a lot more than $20.  

At a work site with Vaxen, 3b1000's, Cray's (what *do* they use?),
etc.  It makes sense to go SCSI since you can cross architectures,
but it wasn't worth the price to me.  I have SCSI on my PS/2 since
that's the only thing fast enough to take advantage of MCA, but I paid for
it: $700 for 105meg HD and controller (Microchannel ain't cheap).
I can still use my Colorado on that, since they sell an external adapter
kit for it (I have no space left in the box). In fact, if I buy a couple
of boards, I can use it on all my computers (or I could have coughed up
twice the amount I spent for the Trakker parallel port backup).

I agree that for a business especially one with multiple vendor
machines SCSI is best, or if you have both Macs and PC's at home,
but if all you have are PC's like me, it's not necessarily worth
the extra money.

BTW, I looked at Irwin drives, but they don't seem to use QIC formats,
so I stayed away from them.  Mountain made some cool ones that used
IDE controllers (1/2-way compromise between SCSI and Floppy?), but
I didn't get that since I wasn't sure what writing a driver for
it would be like, and I only have IDE on my Coh_Box.

My $0.02...can't wait for the driver.  This stack of backup floppies
keeps getting higher.

-Louis
--
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 Louis J. Giliberto, Jr.   ! magus@drktowr.chi.il.us
   -sysadmin drktowr       !   "I had an account at school, but the
   Chicago, IL  USA        !    quota was 300K - what's the point?
Home of DarkTower Software !    One Madonna .gif and it's over!"
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