Ian
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Zip drives - relative speeds (hardware info)
« on: Dec 21st, 2002, 5:03pm » |
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So I've been playing with a variety of Iomega Zip drives, having been a long-term user of their early 100MB version (and suffered the Click of Death thing - see http://grc.com/tip/clickdeath.htm - on two of those before Iomega's warranty replacements system got me one that's lasted for 5 years without problems - all free, all no-questions).
So, I'm a fan, but realised that I was using probably the sloooooooooowest version - 100MB parallel port, on a port that was set to use I/O 3BC, so couldn't run as quick as it should (ECP+EPP mode not available). I arranged for work to buy several to support laptop users and so on, but needing backwards write as well as read compatibility with our stock of 100MB disks ruled out the newest Zip 750. We got IDE and USB Zip 250 drives instead.
I ran a speed test using a 9.86MB (10,097kB) file on a variety of configurations. Here are the results for write speeds (read speeds where about 75% of these - i.e. quicker):-
Drive | Port | Disk | Time | MB per | Mbit per | Relative
Size | Type | Size | (s) | minute | second | to slowest
-------+--------+--------+--------+----------+-----------+-----------
100MB | Par | 100MB | 125 | 4.73 | 0.631 | 100
250MB | USB | 100MB | 124 | 4.77 | 0.636 | 101
250MB | USB | 250MB | 29 | 20.40 | 2.720 | 431
250MB | IDE | 100MB | 58 | 10.20 | 1.360 | 216
250MB | IDE | 250MB | 13 | 45.51 | 6.068 | 962
What surprises me is that the 250MB USB drive is nearly as slow as my old 100MB PPt one when writing to 100MB disks.
From the advertising blurb, the USB2 750MB drive is supposed to whip along at about 7MB/s (56Mbit/s) - unless they're getting bits and bytes confused, this will be 'blink and you miss it' for the same 10MB file. However, since the advertised speed of the 250 IDE drive is 1.4MB/s (11.2Mbit/s), perhaps we should drop the 750MB version by the same proportion (to about 54% of the advert rate) and expect the 10MB file to take 2.6 seconds?
The 250MB drive compares well to an old PIO mode 3 fixed disk - the 750MB one could theoretically be as fast as a UDMA33 HDD. Anyone got one to test?
Just a shame the 750's can't write to 100MB disks!
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