Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] [OT] iomega JAZ drives: a commentary
From: Erik Walthinsen (omega_AT_cse.ogi.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 12 2000 - 05:31:47 EEST
On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
> I am currently investigating the Castlewood JAZ-alike, which costs 50%
> of the price of the Iomega units.
The ORB rocks. $200 drive, $30 disks, hold 2.2GB each. I have verified
read speeds of 12+MB/sec with hdparm, didn't get a number on write, but
it's up there. I've got the external SCSI version, but due to a job
change I don't have anything to plug it into right now.
Beware, however, that the EIDE internal (which is the same size as a
floppy drive) presents (or did, in first rev) itself to the system as a
non-removable drive, and there are DOS/Windoze drivers to handle disk
change. Castlewood has been less than useful, being really hard to
contact. A hack could be worked into the IDE subsystem by someone who
knows what they're doing, if it hasn't already been done. Basically, the
symptom is that the buffer cache entries for the drive are never flushed,
thus reading from a new disk may show you a mix between sectors of all
previous disks in the drive. If you're trying to do something like mount
a filesystem, this is obviously a bit of a problem....
However, if enough people contact them hinting that they might actually
make some sales if the problem is fixed, they might jump a little
faster... I definitely would love to install an internal one of these in
my sound machine, a CD-R just doesn't really cut it.
Once I get a SCSI card for my home box (which I intend to upgrade
dramatically soon), I can do some real timing tests on the thing, for
stuff like seek and throughput.
Erik Walthinsen <omega_AT_cse.ogi.edu> - Staff Programmer @ OGI
Quasar project - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/DISC/projects/quasar/
Video4Linux Two drivers and stuff - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~omega/v4l2/
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