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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.