SyQuest hard disk affords user extrastorage to go
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): What will you do when you run out of hard disk space? If you haven't had that experience before, you're bound to have it pretty soon. Win 95 takes up a lot of hard disk space, and chances are the next generation of applications will take even more. The easiest solution is perhaps to compress the contents of your existing hard disk. To do this, you can use, for instance, Stack Electronics' Stacker disk compression utility. It is quite safe and will quickly relieve your space problems -- at least for the time being. The only trade-off you'll have to endure when using compressed hard disks is the slight reduction in your computer's performance, as data now has to be decompressed on the fly before it is used by the processor.
But, as you install more programs, copy more texture files and cliparts, create long publications, and scan color images, you'll experience the exasperation I've suffered. There are two 540 MB hard disks on my system and in the last couple of weeks I have had to keep on looking into my C:DATA and D:DATA subdirectories to find files to erase to make more space. I don't have to tell you how time consuming this is, and sometimes, pressed by deadlines, I mistakenly erase the files that I still needed.
If I bought a bigger hard disk, I'd have to throw away one of my existing hard disks because my motherboard can only handle two IDE drives. I don't want to do that yet since I've been using them for only a little over a year and they haven't paid for themselves yet. I can't sell them because their prices have plummeted. Besides, nobody in their right mind should buy a used hard disk. So, pressed by the need to have more storage space on my PC, I've been looking for a solution that doesn't force me to rob a bank.
One possible solution is the Sony Magneto-Optical drive. All I need is a SCSI board, the Sony MO drive and its cartridge. I reviewed this product last March.
Courtesy of Memori Primatama, I was able to test drive SQ3105S, the low end of the SyQuest line of drives which are sold in SyQuest De Luxe packages. They cost Rp 650,000 and include three blank cartridges.
Removable
Just like Sony's MO drive, a SyQuest drive consists of a drive and a cartridge. The one I tested used a cartridge that could only hold up to 105 MB. Higher capacity drives, like the SQ3270S, can hold up to 270 MB of data and programs.
The 3.5 inch drive, which is as big as the standard 3.5 inch floppy diskette drive you're familiar with, has a button, an LED light and a lever. When you insert the cartridge, nothing happens. Only when you push the lever all the way to the right does the LED orange light start flashing until the drive spins at the right speed. When the proper speed is reached, the LED light turns green. To take out the cartridge, you have to push the button on the bottom left of the front panel. The indicator will become orange and flashes as the drive slows down. When the light is off, the lever automatically moves to the center. You have to push it all the way to the left to get the cartridge out.
Although the read and write head never touches the surface of the disk inside the cartridge, it's basically still a hard disk and therefore it should be handled carefully. For emergency extraction of the cartridge, there is a tiny hole underneath the slot, through which you can insert a piece of wire to unlock the lever.
The drive can be also mounted upright if you only have one upright slot remaining on your system. This is good because today's slim CPU cases have a very limited number of horizontal drive bays.
The cartridge is removable so you can buy as many cartridges as you wish. Besides, you can transfer huge files easily from one PC to another, or from a PC to a Mac, as long as both have a SyQuest drive. In fact, service bureaus have long favored SyQuest for transporting large files.
The price of the cartridge, on a per MB basis, is a little bit more expensive than the hard disk (105 MB costs about Rp 165.000), but you have the benefit of being able to buy new cartridges to store your data and to transport data files easily.
The cartridge also has a write-protect switch underneath, which requires you to use a pencil or any other pointed object to turn the write-protect on or off. This is a necessary feature to avoid accidentally erasing the data contained in the cartridge.
The 105 MB cartridges come already formatted. In fact, you also find a copy of Symantec utilities, such as FastBack, on them. If you think you'd like to use any of them, you can install it on your system and send your check to Symantec.
SyQuest Utilities
When I first turned on my PC after connecting the newly installed SQ3105S to my SCSI card, nothing happened. My CD ROM drive was still in drive E:. I installed the SyQuest software utilities that come with the drive. It did not recognize my SCSI card, which was AdvanSCSI VL-Bus from AdvanSys. The card itself, when going through the self-test procedure during boot-up, always recognized the drive.
It turned out that no software driver was actually needed to operate the drive. All I had to do was reconfigure the BIOS of the SCSI card to enable it to recognize removable media. After I had done this, I knew everything went well because my CD ROM became drive F:.
Once everything was working, I was able to move a lot of my scanned images to Drive E:. In a short while, I was able to free 42 MB of space on drive C:. I also learned that the system would not recognize the SyQuest drive unless there was a cartridge inside when I powered it on.
Although the SQ3105S worked well without the help of any software driver, installing the utilities is definitely recommended. DOS does not have the ability to recognize removable media. Each time a cartridge is changed when the machine is on, DOS will not notice it. When saving to a different cartridge, data will be lost. One of the utilities included in the package enables the system to recognize cartridge removal or change. Another utility reserves a driver ID number during boot-up, although the drive doesn't contain a cartridge. This is necessary if you have one or more SCSI fixed hard disk drives.
Today, IDE performance has been so very much enhanced that it almost catches up with SCSI. Yet the former is invariably less expensive than the latter. Following the trend, SyQuest has also introduced a IDE version of its removable hard disk drive. In fact, if you have an IDE/AT version, you may not need a hard disk anymore. You can boot directly from the cartridge. If you have a SCSI card that allows a SCSI hard disk to become the primary hard disk in the system, you can also boot from SyQuest
In addition to IDE and SCSI, there are also SCSI and AT versions that connect to your system through its parallel port. Being able to use your SyQuest drive on more than one PC is a neat option to have.
SyQuest also has 5.25 inch drives. Finally, if you have a notebook with a PCMCIA III slot, SyQuest also has a removable drive for it. The 1.8 inch drive has a tiny cartridge that can hold up to 80 MB a cartridge.
Now that I have decided that I should add a removable media in order to get more storage space, there are plenty of choices. Sony MO and SyQuest removable hard disk drives are just two alternatives. SyQuest has a good reputation in the field of removable media, and it offers a two-year warranty for the drive and five years for the cartridge. Besides, it's faster than the MO drive and can run programs at the performance level of a fixed hard disk.
The only problem you may encounter is if the Setup utility doesn't recognize your SCSI board. The device driver should then be installed manually. Next week I hope to test the three-in-one ZIP, a similar product from Iomega, one of SyQuest's strong competitors. I'll tell you about that one, too.