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To: wily who wrote (4451)	12/26/1998 9:17:00 PM
From: AreWeThereYet	Read Replies (1) of 14778

Review of Sony HiFD PP version from c't (special thanks to Werner for the English translation)... Happy New Year to all -- aC The HIFD drive stores around 200MB on a single disk und also is able to read and write the normal HD and DD disks. The track density is dramatically higher then the one on conventional disks: Where formerly 80 where being used there are now 1741. To read such densly written tracks the HIFD now uses magnetooptical servoinformation like the Zip drive. The drive works with 3600RMs and the heads float like a HD in a small distance over the media during the RW process. Conventional disks however are read and written with a standard rotation of 300RPMs, whereas the read and write heads touch the media in this mode. To construct a common device for the narrow HIFD and the big HD/DD media heads so that the heads fly during a high rotation and lie on the media during a low rotation probably was a major challenge for the Sony engineers who constructed the drive. The HIFD first will be released as an external device for the parallel port and already is available in the UK and will be available in Germany around the end of June. For the OEM market Sony will release an ATAPI version. The drives shown at the CeBit also additionally had a floppy interface so that they could replace a conventional floppy drive without any bios modification in currently used hardware. The drive itself doesn't have a power switch and a power consumtion during non active periods of 3.6W, and a power consumtion during activity of 5.7 til 6 W. The benchmark we made was on our usual benchmar system for hard- and changeable diskdrives. The parallelport limited the transfer rate to 700KByte/sec. More than these 700KB/s wasn't possible to achieve from the EPP port of our ASUS P/I-P55TP4XE. The announced ATAPI version of the drive is considered to be much faster and should reach up to 3.6MByte/sec according to Sony. Below in the benchmark list you also will find the results of the HIFD using a conventional HD disk together with the results of a normal 3.5 inch disk drive. Wheras the HIFD works with conventional 200MB disks much faster than a normal floppy disks the HIFD disk works a little bit slower than a floppy disks on conventional 3.5 disks. Sidenote: Our first HIFD disk died after one week of heavy usage and was completely unreadable, the drive only made funny noises anymore. Probably a headcrash had corrupted the media totally rendering the media unusable, the drive however still worked with other HIFD and 3.5' disks normally. Conclusion: As an external removable disk drive the HIFD has its biggest competition in the Zip drive from IOMEGA. It is more attractive due to its higher capacity but lacks the advantage of a multi million user base the Zip drive has. But if Sony manages to get the drive into the machines of the computer manufacturers it would have potential to replace the normal 3.5' floppy drives but only if the headcrash we encountered is a seldom occurence. H2bench results: HIFD-using a HIFD disk Capacity:192MB Speed:3600RPM Average seek time:95ms read(min/av/max - KByte/sec):664/665/668 write:134/388/520 HD disk Capacity:1.44MB Speed:300RPM Average seek time:311ms read(min/av/max):20.1/21.2/21.2 write:19.7/21.0/21.2 DD Disk: Capacity:0.72MB Speed:300RPM Average seek time:268ms read(min/av/max):11.0/11.6/12.7 write:10.9/11.9/12.8 In comparison a standard floppy drive HD Disk: Capacity:1.44MB Speed:300RPM Average seek time:363ms read(min/av/max):20.0/40.4/50.8 write:37.3/39.0/39.7 DD Disk: Capacity:0.72MB Speed:300RPM Average seek time:352ms read(min/av/max):17.9/20.1/20.5 write:18.8/19.5/20.1

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