On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Tim Duggan wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Jon Pennington [SMTP:jpennington@atipa.com]
It should be noted that 6 months ago, the Kenwood 52x ATAPI could outrun the fastest ATAPI and SCSI-II CD-ROMs on >the market, so it's not a slouch, either.
<Pop>
Don't say that Jon, that's when I got my Ultraplex wide. Oh well, another bubble burst.
You'd better put that darning needle away. The Ultraplex Wide has a 10ms faster average seek rate, and the SCSI interface *theoretically* allows higher burst rates than a standard ATAPI connection can allow. The flip side is that your Ultraplex spins down dramatically, whereas my TrueX does not. According to the Plextor web site, your CD has a low-end transfer rate of 17x. My Kenwood (52x) never drops below 48x (6.8mb/sec). I'll also venture that your SCSI unit makes more noise (8900 RPM) than my lowly ATAPI equipment (never gets over 6000), and with only a 512k cache, your CD-ROM works harder to repetitively access large chunks of data (I've got 2mb). I didn't even mention the fact that my CD-ROM reads data with three simultaneous beams and tracks with four more. How many beams does your CD-ROM use? Unfortunately, I don't have the $130+ to spend on an Ultraplex, and I don't have CD-Tach installed, so I can't argue with hard benchmarks (that's an oxymoron anyway). The Ultraplex Wide has one singular advantage: the SCSI UltraWide bus. Otherwise, the consensus in the hardware field is that it is a technologically mediochre product. # umount /dev/flamethrower -- -=|JP|=- Jon Pennington | Atipa Linux Solutions -o) jpennington@atipa.com | Kansas City, MO /\\ 816-241-2641 x107 | http://www.atipa.com _\_V -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/