08/1997
Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!barrett From: osma.ahvenlampi@hut.fi (Osma Ahvenlampi) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Conner CFP1060S SCSI-2 hard drive Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Date: 28 Nov 1995 19:50:32 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 128 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <49fp68$69j@kernighan.cs.umass.edu> Reply-To: osma.ahvenlampi@hut.fi (Osma Ahvenlampi) NNTP-Posting-Host: astro.cs.umass.edu Keywords: hardware, SCSI, hard drive, commercial Originator: barrett@astro.cs.umass.edu PRODUCT NAME Conner CFP1060S SCSI-2 hard drive BRIEF DESCRIPTION This is a cheap, one gigabyte SCSI-2 hard drive (formatted capacity 1015 MB) with 9 ms access speed, 512 KB of RAM cache, and 5400 rpm disk speed. COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Conner Address: 3081 Zanker Road San Jose, California 95134 USA Telephone: (408) 456-4500 (800) 4-CONNER (1-800-426-6637) FAX: (408) 456-4903 (West Coast USA) (407) 262-4755 (East Coast USA) BBS: (408) 456-4415 Web: http://www.conner.com LIST PRICE I bought this drive for $198 (US) plus tax from a large electronics chain in the San Francisco Bay Area. I do not know the list price. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE A computer with a SCSI interface. SOFTWARE None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 3000, 2 MB chip RAM, 12 MB fast RAM. Quantum LP540S internal hard drive. Toshiba XM3601B internal CD-ROM drive in an external case. Western Digital WD33C39-04PROTO SCSI chip. AmigaDOS 3.1 INSTALLATION [MODERATOR'S NOTE: If you are not comfortable opening up your Amiga, then you should have the work done by an authorized Amiga service center or at least a professional. Opening your Amiga yourself may void your warranty, and careless work may even damage the machine. - Dan] This is an internal SCSI hard drive, and thus requires the usual steps of installing such devices. Open up the machine, locate a free 3.5" drive bay, install the drive there, plug in the SCSI and power cables, and check the termination. SCSI requires that the LAST drive on the internal cable is terminated, and the others are not. Similarly, if you have external devices, the LAST of those should be terminated. Termination causes a lot of problems to many people installing SCSI devices, so make sure you get it right. REVIEW I bought this drive for its price, expecting no great performance from it (although Conner lists is as a drive in the Performance series, probably because it is a SCSI-2 drive). I was, in fact, somewhat surprised with the performance achieved. In the A3000 SCSI bus, which, while being a very good implementation for its age, still is an old bus and can only reach up to about 4MB/s, this drive showed a raw SCSI performance of nearly that, leading me to suspect that it in fact does max out my SCSI bus. In FFS speed tests, I got a 1MB/s throughput on a 32 KB buffer, and up to 3.5MB/s when utilising the cache fully. Using huge transfer sizes to overflow the buffers of the drive, I measured a 2.2 MB/s maximum sustained speed. While not a speed demon compared to the high performance audio/video disks with 4-6 MB/s sustained transfer rate, this was by no account a bad result for a cheap drive like this. This drive supports synchronous transfers. The drive, like Conners in general, is quite noisy. Whereas the step motor of the Quantum produces a silent click, the Conner can be heard from a distance when it is accessing. This may or may not bother you. I wouldn't recommend having a machine with this drive doing something in the same room while you are trying to sleep. I would say this drive is a very good buy for the older machines, which won't be able to take full advantage of the faster drives anyway. If you need some cheap fixed storage and the loud clicking of a Conner drive doesn't bother you, consider this drive. If you own a 40 MHz 040 or even 060 Amiga with an extremely fast SCSI-2 interface, you might want to consider a 7200 rpm drive instead. COPYRIGHT Copyright 1995 Osma Ahvenlampi. This review can be freely used in free-of-charge publications. To use this review for other purposes, please contact the author at the address Osma.Ahvenlampi@hut.fi. -- This message was brought to you by Voodoo - Email magic Osma.Ahvenlampi@hut.fi | http://www.hut.fi/~oahvenla Co-author of the ClassAct GUI toolkit | http://www.pcnet.com/~caldi Editor of Amiga Report Technical Journal | http://www.warped.com/~artech --- Accepted and posted by Daniel Barrett, comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews