Subject: REVIEW: Conner CFP1060S SCSI-2 hard drive
From: [email-masked] (Osma Ahvenlampi)
Date: 28 Nov 1995 19:50:32 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	Conner CFP1060S SCSI-2 hard drive

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	This is a cheap, one gigabyte SCSI-2 hard drive (formatted capacity
1015 MB) with 9 ms access speed, 512 KB of RAM cache, and 5400 rpm disk
speed.

COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		Conner
	Address:	3081 Zanker Road
			San Jose, California 95134
			USA

	Telephone:	(408) 456-4500
			(800) 4-CONNER (1-800-426-6637)
	FAX:		(408) 456-4903 (West Coast USA)
			(407) 262-4755 (East Coast USA)
	BBS:		(408) 456-4415

	Web:		http://www.conner.com

LIST PRICE

	I bought this drive for $198 (US) plus tax from a large electronics
chain in the San Francisco Bay Area.  I do not know the list price.

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	HARDWARE

		A computer with a SCSI interface.

	SOFTWARE

		None.

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	Amiga 3000, 2 MB chip RAM, 12 MB fast RAM.
	Quantum LP540S internal hard drive.
	Toshiba XM3601B internal CD-ROM drive in an external case.
	Western Digital WD33C39-04PROTO SCSI chip.
	AmigaDOS 3.1

INSTALLATION

	[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  If you are not comfortable opening up your
	Amiga, then you should have the work done by an authorized Amiga
	service center or at least a professional.  Opening your Amiga
	yourself may void your warranty, and careless work may even damage
	the machine.  - Dan]

	This is an internal SCSI hard drive, and thus requires the usual
steps of installing such devices. Open up the machine, locate a free 3.5"
drive bay, install the drive there, plug in the SCSI and power cables, and
check the termination. SCSI requires that the LAST drive on the internal
cable is terminated, and the others are not. Similarly, if you have external
devices, the LAST of those should be terminated. Termination causes a lot of
problems to many people installing SCSI devices, so make sure you get it
right.

REVIEW

	I bought this drive for its price, expecting no great performance
from it (although Conner lists is as a drive in the Performance series,
probably because it is a SCSI-2 drive).

	I was, in fact, somewhat surprised with the performance achieved.
In the A3000 SCSI bus, which, while being a very good implementation for its
age, still is an old bus and can only reach up to about 4MB/s, this drive
showed a raw SCSI performance of nearly that, leading me to suspect that it
in fact does max out my SCSI bus. In FFS speed tests, I got a 1MB/s
throughput on a 32 KB buffer, and up to 3.5MB/s when utilising the cache
fully. Using huge transfer sizes to overflow the buffers of the drive, I
measured a 2.2 MB/s maximum sustained speed. While not a speed demon
compared to the high performance audio/video disks with 4-6 MB/s sustained
transfer rate, this was by no account a bad result for a cheap drive like
this.

	This drive supports synchronous transfers.

	The drive, like Conners in general, is quite noisy. Whereas the step
motor of the Quantum produces a silent click, the Conner can be heard from a
distance when it is accessing. This may or may not bother you.  I wouldn't
recommend having a machine with this drive doing something in the same room
while you are trying to sleep.

	I would say this drive is a very good buy for the older machines,
which won't be able to take full advantage of the faster drives anyway. If
you need some cheap fixed storage and the loud clicking of a Conner drive
doesn't bother you, consider this drive. If you own a 40 MHz 040 or even 060
Amiga with an extremely fast SCSI-2 interface, you might want to consider a
7200 rpm drive instead.

COPYRIGHT

	Copyright 1995 Osma Ahvenlampi.

	This review can be freely used in free-of-charge publications.
	To use this review for other purposes, please contact the author
	at the address [email-masked].

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