All have good and bad points. Ultra DMA drives these days provide huge capacities,
are inexpensive (as little as 5 to 10 cents per megabyte), generally easy to install
and are as fast as some SCSI drives. They double disk read and write speeds of earlier
DMA drives from 16.6MB per second to 33.3MB/sec. (Some UDMA drives that support 66.6MB/sec
are coming, may be available by the time you read this; they require an 80-pin cable
instead of the 40-pin cable standard for 33MB/sec drives. The two cables are pin-compatible,
but the 80-pin version has added ground wires to reduce crosstalk.) UDMA also allows
data transfers to take place with very little CPU involvement, which can mean better
overall system performance.
A very few UDMA drives have had problems (see sidebar) and buyers should be aware
of a few cautions, but I believe they are the best current choices for mass storage
in typical home or small office systems.
SCSI drives come in a bewildering number of categories: Wide, Fast-Wide, Ultra Wide
and the latest. Ultra 2 LVD (Low Voltage Differential). They need SCSI boards of
varying types (and prices) to provide maximum performance. Frankly, I feel that SCSI
drives are great for servers, serious game-players, multimedia or high-end graphics
work and heavy-duty publishing or video editing, but not necessary for most "grass-roots"
users.
They cost a lot: 50% to 100% or more than Ultra DMA drives of similar capacity. (One
big computer chain store near me recently sold an 8.4GB Maxtor UDMA drive for $179,
while a no-name Ultra Wide SCSI drive went for $299. Both were "bare drive only"
prices so you would have to add the cost of a SCSI board unless you already had one.)
And a SCSI drive may not be noticeably faster for the work most of us do most of
the time.
Removable cartridge drives appear to be losing ground. Syquest apparently went belly-up
late last year and Iomega's profits were down in 1998. Cartridges are not cheap and
they are slower than UDMA drives. High-Capacity Floppy drives and media cost about
the same but have the advantage of backward compatibility (i.e. they read and write
to traditional 3.5-inch floppy diskettes). CD-R/DVD drives may be a better choice
as prices drop, but let's leave them for a future column when they have achieved
a more mainstream status.
How about the UDMA drive cautions mentioned above? First, read ads carefully. Drives
advertised as "OEM" or "bare drive only," common practice for
some large chain retailers (e.g. Fry's Electronics), normally don't include any cables,
instructions, software (drivers and utilities) or mounting hardware. The latter come
in full retail packages, which typically cost about $30-$40 more.
You can usually download drivers and utilities from the drive maker's Website but
unless you're comfortable dealing with hardware and have some know-how, the retail
package is your best bet. The instructions and installation utility alone can be
invaluable. If installing hardware is scary for you, ask about having the drive installed
or seek help from a knowledgeable User Group member. I have found that utilities
such as Seagate's DiscWizard make installation virtually painless IF you follow the
directions!
If you have a computer built in 1997 or before, its BIOS likely won't support a UDMA
drive larger than 8.4GB; most systems built after about mid-1998 include such support.
OnTrack's Disk Manager may correct this, but the easiest way to avoid problems with
older computers is to go no larger than 8.4GB. Also, if you run a WinTel system without
Windows 95 OSR2.x or Win98 with FAT32, you must divide the drive into partitions
of no more than 2.1GB. PartitionMagic from PowerQuest is the best tool for this job.
Not so incidentally, hard drive manufacturers have some of the best, most helpful
Websites around. Go to: Seagate, www.seagate.com;
Western Digital, www.wdc.com; Maxtor,
www.maxtor.com; Quantum, www.quantum.com; IBM, www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl.htm; or Fujitsu, www.fujitsu.com/harddisk.html.
Hope this helps you expand your computer horizons and gives you room to grow!
Ken
(Author's Note: I want to give credit to Earthlink Network, www.earthlink.net,
source of much of the information contained above. Its site deserves regular visits
because it contains a lot of useful Web-oriented information that is updated frequently.)
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