Joe:
Thank you *very* much for your careful reply to my questions about the Syjet and backups. The only reason I took so long to respond is that I was called out of town for a family emergency (ok now), and that kept me away from computers for more than two weeks. (Nice break, actually.....)
I'm hoping that others won't think that my questions are off-topic here, since if the Syjet doesn't have Win95 or Win NT capabilities (or if its tech support is poor, as suggested by your having had to develop specific contacts), that certainly reflects on Syquest as an investment (which I've had under consideration also, ever since the strong PCMag review last spring. Should have jumped when it was below $2, of course....).
I saw here that some astoundingly good deals on the Syjet ($2xx) have appeared from time to time (missed them, of course), and I haven't decided yet whether to wait for one of those or to just take the plunge. Come to think of it, maybe those deals were only on internal models? Non-SCSI models?
You wrote:
>> no utilities are available for NT. The Win 95 utilities do not work on my Win 95 system <<
Did you mean that, or did you mean to say that "the Win95 utilities do not work on my NT sustem"? Or do you mean that a Win95 user is forced to use Win3.x utilities?
You wrote also (thereby contributing to my confusion above):
>> My guess is that if you connect the SCSI version to a Win 95 system, you won't have any problems. <<
At the moment my TI Travelmate 5300 (1gb hard drive, best TI could do for me a year ago when I bought it, but boy I'd like to upgrade that!) is running Win95a (original Win95 with virtually all the updates), but eventually I hope to go to Win95b=OSR2 with a 32 bit FAT. (I doubt I'll want Win98, because I don't *want* the internet integrated into my desktop; most of my time is spent doing real work by myself!) Have you seen any reports about whether the Syjet utilities (particularly backup) work with Win95b, particularly if its 32-bit FAT option is enabled?
Incidentally, what sort of utilities are there, other than backup?
Finally, one more question. You wrote:
>> Since the Syjet appears as just another hard drive to the controller, if it is assigned target address '0', there should be no problem booting from it. <<
Normally, I expect to boot from the Travelmate's own internal hard drive. I don't intend to boot from the Syjet except in case of a problem; that is, I want to use a Syjet cartridge in place of an emergency diskette (or working together with an emergency diskette). So normally my Syjet will have a target address '1'. How big a deal is it to switch the target address to '0' in case of emergency?
A possible complication here is that the Travelmate's own drive is IDE (or maybe EIDE); the Scsi port is on the docking station.
Thank you again, very much, for the education.
Cordially, Roger Folsom |
