Well, I installed the internal EIDE SparQ drive today (I had to get the extra IDE cable which my system lacked, and which SyQuest doesn't provide).
The installation was pretty easy. About the same complexity as adding a regular hard-drive. There were two problems: I had to go through extra steps to rename the drive letters -- for some reason, the SparQ drive always wants to be the next-letter drive after the internal IDE HDD. It thus reassigns drive letters to my CD-ROM drives and my SCSI hard drive. Also, I had to tell Windows to treat the SparQ as a non-INT 13 device (so that I can force an arbitrary drive letter selection). Second, my PC couldn't read some sectors off of the SparQ installation floppy disk. (The problem may be my old 3.5" drive -- I'll check the floppy at work tomorrow and let you all know.)
When I first rebooted after installing the SparQ, the SparQ drive became drive D: (and my Ultra-wide SCSI HDD became E: -- see above paragraph). Because I have Windows swap to drive D:, the first time I rebooted my PC, it used the SparQ as the swap device. While certainly slower than my IDE HDD and my SCSI HDD, the SparQ was fast enough to do an adequate job of swapping -- I could actually use the system like this -- the drive is almost as fast as an actual HDD. (Not quite, but close.)
Now that I've got this, I'm going to have a hard time going back to parallel-port based drives!
Joseph |
