|2-Magnetic Media Article hand wittten by Rude Boy/iNDi Typed out by Pex le Sex/QuI Right today, boys and girls, I want to talk to you about media. No not the newsmen and women of the world of TV and radio, but magnetic media like what us computer buffs use in our pooters (as Pex calls them, but he's always been a bit strange). (<-- Thanks Howard, I don't know what you are talking about, weeb, bang, blob... blob, ring, ting - Pex.) Anyhow, so what's so bloody interesting about magnetic media,well, er, nothing really, but I felt you deserved to be as bored as me. So the young fibrant people should leave now and the rest of us sad suicidly depressed - got nothing better to do with our lives people will press on!! :-( The thing that interests me about magnetic media is just what different types there are and the relative costs, which are changing, and I might add for the better, all the time. The most obvious one is the DD Disks or double density 3.5 inch floppy disks as they are called (which the Amiga has used as standard from day one - ooohh he's clever isn't he mum?). These can be picked up from anywhere at prices ranging from 50 pence each for the branded version to 10-15 pence each for the recycled coverdisks. Having bought some "New" branded disks for £20 per 100 at a local computer fair I shouldn't have been suprised to find that 38% had hard track errors, unusually I had overridden the almost "choking" desire to buy them at another stall at £2 cheaper and purchased them from a local stores stall. So armed with the faulty portion of disks, back I trundled and got them changed at their local shop. A fellow purchaser had bought his from another stall and faced with sending them several hundred miles by post decided to cut his losses. Expressing the poor quality of the said disks I was informed that rather than being quality disks sold cheaply they were actually cheap disks bought in especially to compete at the local computer fairs. I have since heard that some traders sell reject disks from software companies, but likewise I know people who have bought cheap disks without a single problem, you always take a chance when you buy stuff cheap anyway. That brings me onto the EsCom shops. They have an offer where you can buy HIGH density disks at £7.60 for 100. These can be formatted for the Amiga and used as DD disks and they appear to be alright. This brings me neatly onto the second magnetic media, HD disks. Having said that the Amiga uses DD disks, the A4000/030/040 comes as standard with a high density disk drive, which means rather than just getting 880 Kbytes onto a DD disk you can put 1.76 Mbytes. There are also ways of formatting DD disks to get more space. Utilities such as diskexpander, powerpacker, lha, lzx etc that will crunch programs to get more on, but bear with me as I think other people want to get articles into the Word 8!! Back to high density drives, Power Computing do an internal and external HD drive (XL) which I note has gone up to £79.99 from £59.99. Also their normal DD drive seems to have disappeared.and their new drive (the Super XL) promised a massive 3.5 megs onto a HD disk using uncompressed data (??) and at approx £120 this ain't cheap, but it may be just what you need. More magnetic media; the next most popular magnetic media is hard disks. If you do anything more than play games, get one now! Go on, sod off and buy one, but read this first please :-) The A1200 and A600 as we all know are made to take the 2.5 inch hard disks, unfortunately these are somewhat expensive compared to the 3.5 inch equivalents but what's an inch between friends I hear you cry? A bloody lot if you have even seen them side by side!! The down side is due to their size they are a lot more trouble to fit inside than the 2.5 (if you can used screwdriver and plug in a mouse - you can fit a 2.5 hard disks) also they can take a bit more power and the standard A1200 PSU (Power Supply Unit to the Non-Technical of us) is rumoured in certain cases to be not quite man enough resulting in crashes etc. To be truthful I don't know anyone who has confirmed this and there are a lot of people using 3.5 hard disks. The hard drives that I am referring to are IDE drives as against SCSI drives. What's the difference I hear you shout? Well Pop-pickers, without going into the techno-jargon (which means I don't actually know :-)) the A1200/A600 supports IDE drives (both 2.5 and 3.5) but not SCSI drives. However you can get SCSI interfaces for your pooter, these come (usually) in 2 forms. Either built into certain expansion boards or the flavour of the month - the squirrel (no nutty jokes thank you). Yes this afformentioned rodent is in actually fact a device which plugs into the side PIMICIA (?) socket and is in fact a lead. The use of which allows you to plug in more or less ANY SCSI device, and hard disks, CD Roms, Tapestreamer etc. This of course sounds excellent (dood). It saves you opening up your beloved Amiga wherby invalidating the warranty (are there any Amiga's less than 12 months old now anyway?) and it allows you to couple up to 7 devices. On the otherhand if you are only interested in a hard disk it's not quite so good!! First with an IDE drive you need a hard drive, a cable and software to format and install. For the SCSI you need the squirrel which costs £50.00 and a SCSI drive (approximately 50%-100% dearer) and case and PSU which costs £65 plus software - not quite as cheap eh? The good news about hard drives in general is that they are falling in price, 12 months ago you would be paying about £1 per meg for a 3.5 inch drive, and about £2 per meg for the 2.5 inch. These days 3.5 inch drives go for £1 for 4-5 megs and the 2.5 go for £1 per meg. This makes the 3.5 inch on a par with DD disks price wise. It is also possible to store, but not use from complete disks onto hard drive by using a utility called DMS (Disk Masher Service) which crunches the complete disk (including bootblock) which can be transferred onto the hard drive as normal and unDMS the file back onto floppy when required. ^20^^30 The next magnetic media I would like to discuss with you, my learned collegues, is VBS or Video Backup System. This basically uses a bog standard (that doesn't mean it is used in the toilet - PeX) video to store computer disks and programs onto standard video tape (and of course restore them :-)). If you already have a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) and can park it adjacent to your pooter this is by far and away the cheapest form of storage medium, even without the latest software which now compresses the data. It is possible to store 150 disks on a 3 hour tape, which at £2 each is cheap!! With good heads (ooer missus) this is a reliable system. You do of course need the connection lead and software - £59 from Power Computing - and is time consuming trying to find a particular disk on a particular tape. However, as a backup system for both floppy and hard drives it is highly recommended. I have myself been using one for 2 years and am very pleased with it. So what other forms of magnetic media are there? Well there are a number of them, but to be honest most I know either little or nothing about, but I will mention them in passing. |1-The Tapestreamer This is the computer equivalent of VBS, and it allows a lot quicker access to specialist tapes, as does; SYQUEST CARTRIDGE DRIVE and D.A.T tape drives. Then there is magnetic optical disks and CD-Roms. The writeable CD-ROM machines are again dropping in price but will have to come down a hell of a long way for me to afford one!! The last and latest inovation (thank God as I am getting tired of typing this Howard - PeX) to hit the magnetic media world is the Zip Drive. This is in effect a floppy drive using large capacity floppy disks, would you believe 100 Mbytes!! There is of course a corresponding rise in price, currently disks are being advertised at £15 each and the Zip drive at £180. Already the Pee-Cee mags are discounting the price if you buy 10 to £90 plus VAT and the Zip drive to £150. I firmly believe will drop as more are produced, especially the disks. Whilst I don't believe all the hype about them replacing the floppy disk :-) the potential is obvious for cheap, fast, storage being easily transferrable and swappable between pooters. Inadvertably the VBS tapes tend to prefer their own video, and can produce errors on other machines due to slight head allignment differences. At present the equivalent to say a Zip drive and 10 disks is dearer than a 1 Gig 3.5 inch IDE drive, but the Zip disks are easily and cheaply bought - not quite so for bigger IDE drives though!! So there you have it, you pays your money and takes your choice. |1-Bye from the Rude Boy/iNDi... End