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June 29, 1998, TechWeb News
SyQuest
By
One of the oldest players in the removable-media game, SyQuest has a new, neat concept in the 1-Gbyte SparQ drive. Unfortunately, it should be faster.
The unit tested was bogged down by a slow parallel port interface. Although the parallel port makes a great universal interface, it is too slow for a 1-Gbyte drive. No matter the performance claims, CRN Test Center engineers have never seen even as much as a 1-Mbyte-per-second transfer through a parallel port.
Needless to say, the SparQ drive did not live up to SyQuest's performance claims of a maximum transfer rate of 2 MBps-it did not even come close to minimum performance claims of 900 KBps. Test files totaling 55.3 Mbytes took 355 seconds to copy from hard disk to SparQ disk, for a "write" transfer rate of 156 KBps. At that rate it would take about 107 minutes to fill up a 1-Gbyte cartridge. It took 391 seconds to transfer the same data back to hard disk, for a "read" transfer rate of 141 KBps.
Sometimes it is possible to tweak parallel port settings to improve performance, but tweaking port settings from system to system defeats the purpose of a universal interface. All parallel ports are different, and the SparQ drive might perform much better on one system than another.
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Regards - Dale |
