Removable Media BY BRUCE WASSERMAN, DONALD JENNER & DAVID ALSBERG SPECIAL TO Corel Magazine No small part of the multimedia puzzle is the hardware -- sound cards, video cards, speakers, and so on. For most people, the big-ticket item in the mix will be one or more removable-disk products drives. Multimedia requires CD-ROM capability; most multimedia software and all but an insignificant amount of video and audio files are distributed this way. If "multimedia" is to include a certain amount of roll-your-own, the requirement extends to write-able media, both to extend local storage, and to take finished files to a service bureau for mastering, if your budget does not extend to a mid-four-figure CD-ROM mastering drive. What follows hardly exhausts what is a very large topic, with a long list of vendors; it does highlight major options. The centerpiece of the story is Bruce Wasserman's detailed look at SyDOS/Syquest removable hard disk and Iomega Bernoulli disk systems. Syquest has had the major share of studio-to-service-bureau business for a long time; SyDOS is their marque for PC-family equipment. Bruce looks at their SCSI-controlled 5.25" drive, while Don Jenner comments on the recently released 3.5" Marlin removable hard disk system. Don Jenner and Dave Alsberg also tested representative plug-and-play CD-ROM drives. Connecting through a printer port (with pass-through, so the port is still usable for printing), these prove to be a reasonable solution where portability is a major issue, and playback speed can be sacrificed -- e. g., to access data or program files. For true multimedia support -- especially where playback of video is an issue -- the new generation of double-spin CD-ROM drives, supporting the several different standards for digital data (ISO, High Sierra and Photo-CD, as well as audio and perhaps Kanji) are a must. They greatly exceed MPC (multimedia PC) minimums, are generally SCSI devices, and come from such vendors as Sony, NEC, Toshiba and Texel. Don Jenner tested a Procom macCD station (Mac SCSI drives like this interface to DOS machines as well), using a Procom busmastering SCSI controller. According to company specs, this is the fastest drive commonly available on the market (in fact, our sensing software reports it to be a Toshiba double-spin drive, considered to be at the high end of the speed curve). [Wasserman on Iomega & Syquest 5.25" drives] Every time I have upgraded my system with more hard disk storage space, I thought that I would have more than sufficient storage for quite some time to come. Not so -- it always seemed that right after the increase I would get new software and then my hard drive would again be stuffed. Stacker 2.0 abated this problem for a while stretching my 200mb hard drive to about 325mb -- but it was a stop-gap measure. The thing to do was to get a removable and to get the largest removable (and most affordable) drive I could find. The word "affordable" instantly removed the optical drives from contention since they usually run well over $2,000 before you even bought the cartridges. Tape backup was the least expensive way to store large files but it is not a "random access" device, and not practical for files I need to access frequently. That left removable disks such as the Iomega Bernoulli drives and the SyQuest/SyDos removable har disk drives. These companies compete closely with each other. Iomega uses a proprietary technology the company developed, blending what is essentially a "flexible" disk somehwat like a floppy with a head technology akin to that of a hard disk. Syquest uses more conventional hard-disk technology, mounting the hard disk it self in a removable cartridge; the company claims they can easily advance their products by building on wider industry standards. Both drive systems deliver access speeds and transfer rates comparable to standard fixed disks -- that is to say, substantially faster than currently available optical disk products. Since I was planning on daisy chaining the removable drive to my Corel LS2000 (now available from Always Technology as the AL-500 Pro) which connects my CD-ROM, it was important to get a true SCSI drive. Both units are true SCSI devices. Something to note and avoid: If you are planning on using your own SCSI adapter, make sure that the software drivers will support the removable drive BEFORE you buy the unit to avoid the aggravation that comeswith not being able to get the unit to run. Also check and make sure that the cables will be compatible. Case in point: I was advised to order the Mac version of the Bernoulli because the Mac version didn't come with the adapter card which I didn't need and was cheaper as a result. Unfortunately, the Mac cable that came with the unit wouldn't fit my Corel card so Iomega had to replace it. They sent the new cable within two days. Unfortunately it still would not allow me to daisy chain it to my CD-ROM drive. I needed to get another cable yet again, which Iomega quickly provided. I then discovered that the Corel software that I had would support neither Bernoulli 150 nor the Bernoulli 90. Corel soon resolved that problem with software version 1.1 and the Bernoulli was up and running in a flash. The software installation was quite easy and seamless. The daisy chaining worked like a champ with out a glitch. The SyDos installation was not as aggravating as the Bernoulli because I had the current supporting software and the unit daisy chained to my Bernoulli in a few short minutes. There was no need to even pop the cover of my computer for the installation. The supplied cartridge required formatting (The Iomega cartridge came pre-formatted from the factory) but software formatting was quick and easy with very intuitive prompting along the way. One very nice thing about the SyDos unit is that the same cable that connects to their controller card (which I didn't need to use) could also be used to daisy chain the drive. It is a 50pin to 50pin SCSI rather than a 50pin to 25pin D-shell. The SyDos instruction manual answered every question that I had about the unit in a very clear and straight forward fashion. The original Iomega instructions looked great, but were absolutely impossible to make sense of unless you are an engineer (Iomega has since rewritten the manual, and it is now much better). The technical support that I got from Iomega was first class. Their 800 telephone number is plastered all over their literature and they have it printed on all of their cartridges (they even have the telephone numbers for the 16 countries where they provide technical support). The few times that I couldn't get through to them they returned my call within a few hours. Unfortunately the first two times I called SyDos technical support I couldn't get through; I left messages that were never returned. The third time I called I got through and they were very cordial and apologetic about not getting back to me. The subsequent times that I called I either got through immediately or had the call returned very quickly. Iomega's Bernoulli system offers a larger range of 5.25" cartridge sizes including: 35mb, 44mb, 65mb, 90mb, 105mb and 150mb. Only the 150mb drive will read and write to all the above; it will only read the 44mb. SyDos presently only offers a 5.25" 88mb and 44mb cartridges. Only the 88C will read and write to both. However, SyDos also offers other units such as the Marlin which is an internal IDE (a SCSI version was announced as this was being written) removable drive with 3.5" 105 mg cartridge and the Pro-Note with a 2.5" 42 mg cartridge geared toward the laptop market. Both units can be configured to recognized by the computer as a hard drive rather than as a removable because some software packages will not allow installation to a removable drive. The Iomega does it via an hardware switch and the SyDos via software. (Again, if you are using your own SCSI card make sure that the software will allow this switch). This feature is particularly helpful with systems where the removable drive is the main storage device because it can be used as the boot disk. The relative sizes of the units are very similar. The Bernoulli transportable is 9.75"x10.75"x2.75" high while the SyDos is 9.75"x10"x2.25" high. The cartridges are approximately 5.25" square by .75" thick and 5.25" square by .5" thick respectively Installing a removable disk -- I've been a Bernoulli user for about a year -- turned out to be one of the smartest moves I ever made. I now have two 150mb cartridges stacked (Iomega comes with Stacker) to yield about 270mb each (loaded with programs and files). I also have a 90mb cartridge devoted just to games for my kid. No longer does he need to intrude on my disk space. Whenever I need more space I simply buy another cartridge. Which one should you get? Put quite simply if you are getting it to transport files to a service bureau the SyDos would probably be the better choice because SyQuest has pretty much conquered that market when Macs predominated in computer graphics and Bernoullis didn't come in a Mac version (Syquest's own study shows 56 percent of the service bureau market use Syquest drives). However, make sure that you get the SyDos unit that will read rind write to a 44mb cartridge because many service bureaus only have the 44mb drive. While SyDOS units are PC-family specific, the Syquest cartridges used in them can be read in Mac-connected Syquest drives, using commonly available utilities such as Access- PC, according to SyDOS. If you need the extra large storage to transport large files or if you move from site to site and use other computers, both IBM compatibles and Macs, the Bernoulli 150mb transportable model is very attractive. It has its own power supply and will also plug directly into a Mac to transfer information. While the SyDos states very clearly in its manual that it will not work with a Mac, there are SyQuest units on themarket that will work on both platforms. lf your needs require you to transfer varied sizes of information and prefer a cartridge that offers a larger range of sizes. The list prices of the units and the cartridges bear little resemblance to the street price. Generally the SyDos units can be found for about 35% of suggested retail and the Iomega'scan be found for 65%. While this may seem to be a tremendous difference, in fact the prices are very close for comparable units. The SyDos 88 external that will read and write to a 44 has a street price of about $750 while the Iomega 90 external goes for about $675. The SyDos 44 cartridges average about $65-$70 and the 88 goes for about $100-$130. The omega 90 sells at about $140 and the 44 goes out at $95. (The Iomega cartridges are very often sold in packages of three together at these prices.) [Don Jenner on the Syquest Marlin] SyDOS's Marlin 3.5", 110mb removable disk drive arrived just as we were about to pick up a new bench system; we took it along and had it mounted alongside the mammoth Toshiba SCSI hard disk. The version supplied uses a supplied IDE controller; the SCSI version has been announced but was unfortunately not available for testing -- which meant losing a slot to a single-purpose controller. That was, so far as we could tell, the only downside. Installation was as close to plug-and-play as one could get; the card went in a slot, the drive went in a bay, and a cable connected them. We ran the software installer; it added a line to CONFIG.SYS, and took us through the format- the-disk process. Voilą! We had another drive. The Marlin looks to DOS and Windows exactly like another hard disk -- which, in fact, it is. More to the point, it >behaves< like a hard disk. It is fast; SyDOS claims this disk has more or less the same access times and transfer rates as comparable fixed disk systems, and so far as we could tell, this is accurate. Marlin average access times are about 25 percent faster than those of 5.25" Syquest drives, and about twice the speed of comparable Iomega Bernoulli drives. Among other things, this means the Marlin is much faster than either CD-ROM or various writable optical- storage systems presently available. The speed the drive offers means that the time overhead concommitant with disk- compression programs such as Stacker or MSDOS 6.0's DoubleDisk is no greater than that associated with fixed- disk systems (conservatively, about seven percent longer access times). In a real sense, the higher throughput this newer design offers makes the Marlin a very good tool for multimedia development. Use it to store video clips and sound clips for the project in hand. Video plays back as fast as need be; .WAV files (convenient if not so elegant as fancier sound files) fit nicely and again, play back without a hitch. In situations where playback equipment can be controlled -- e. g., in a corporate environment -- it would also make an excellent medium for carrying a multimedia presentation from development site to conference room. The only doubt that has been raised about this drive, in conversation with regular removable-media users, has been the novel size. These folks are used to using the 5.25" media (and most of them have those drives). This installed base might mean slower acceptance of the new size disk cartridge; the advantage is that this system handily installs in standard 3.5" bays as well as 5.25" bays (the drive comes with the requisite mounting hardware for both). The other objection is the uncompressed capacity of the disk; SyDOS's parent company, Syquest, has not announced more capacious versions, but given the competition, it is reasonable to expect that they will be moving to media and mechanisms offering more storage in the same footprint. The real competition, of course, would be high-capacity optical drive systems running at comparable speeds. Canon, for example, has shown a 200mb-plus MOD (magneto-optical drive) system using a single-pass technology -- most MOD drives require three passes to write data, which is part of the reason they are so slow. This technology is still in the lab and at the technology showcases; Canon's expressed plan is to have an initial commercial product in the pipeline not before well into 1995. [David Alsberg & Don Jenner on Parallel Port CD-ROM drives] Popping the system hood to put in a new drive is a pain for most folks, even the ones who've taken to this technology in a big way. Several companies have figured this out, and now offer removable media products that interface to system parallel ports. The two units tested -- from MicroSolutions and SyDOS -- are representative of the breed; one comes from a company specializing in parallel- port media devices, and the the other from a company with a long history in removable disk systems. Here's the basic idea: Parallel ports -- usually used for printer connections -- are moderately fast (at least, compared to serial ports). They offer varying degrees of bidirectional communications (true PIO [parallel input/output] ports are true bidirectional ports; printer ports are often not entirely capable this way). Most people have at least one parallel port; many have two; laptop- and notebook-computer users often have no other high speed connectivity option. The current standard is just about to be "upgraded" to higher speed, which will make PIO connectivity increasingly attractive as a cheap, effective, easy way to add a variety of devices -- scanners and film recorders, as well as new generations of fast printers. Companies like MicroSolutions and SyDOS are riding ahead of the curve in this move. Most standard-brand machines have bidirectional parallel ports -- though a switch setting may be in order to activate the bidirectional capability. If you have an older second or third tier clone, you may want to check for compatibility. As more bidirectional parallel devices come to market, you'd want this capability anyway. The MicroSolutions CD-ROM drive is one of a series of products the company offers using this connectivity strategy; the rest of the line includes a tape drive, add-on floppy drives and add-on hard disks. The CD-ROM drive sports a beige 6"x10.5"x2.25" housing uniform in appearance with other items in its lineup. A three foot parallel cable is built in to the rear of the unit, along with a printer-passthrough connector allowing daisy-chaining another device, plug-ins for audio line-in and line-out and the usual powerpack cable, as well as a micro-toggle power switch. This switch must also be on for the parallel-port passthrough to function. The drive itself rolls out from the front of the box (gently push it in to unlatch it, and it pops out) and carries a stereo minijack for headphones or speakers and a volume wheel for audio playback. Installation is a matter of plugging in the cable to the computer's printer port (the standard kind will do; we had better performance on a true PIO connection, though) and running the installation software to add a CD-ROM device line to the CONFIG.SYS file and the MSCDEX call to your AUTOEXEC file (DOS 6.0 users: you will need to use the new version included with DOS; the version currently shipping with this drive is for older versions of DOS). Update your Windows drives for CD and you are in business. SyDOS (the DOS side of Syquest) has entered the CD-ROM market with a its Personal CD player plugging into a bidirectional parallel port. For a low price, you get a standard CD-ROM device that doubles as an audio CD, which like the MicroSolutions drive can be easily moved from one machine to another. Just to make the deal irresistable, SyDOS bundles Corel Draw 3.0 (one of the first end-user applications supplied on CD-ROM); the company is looking into a 4.0 bundle, to judge from hints. As with the MicroSolutions drive, the good news is ease of installation and convenience. The Personal CD just plugs in, no muss, no fuss. A three foot parallel extension cable is included, though your desk has to have room for a device with an 8.5 x 6 " footprint. Your existing printer is plugged into the back of the Personal CD, and printing is passed through transparently. Run INSTALCD from the enclosed 3.5 or 5.25 disks, and you're up and running in less than 3 minutes. (The installation routine specifies DOS 3.x or DOS 5.0, but there should be no problem with DOS 6.0 -- except for the MSCDEX change noted above). There's also an audio jack for stereo sound output, and SyDOS's utility, PLAYIT.EXE, is automatically installed for playing audio CDs as well as CD- ROM data. The audio quality is quite acceptable. On the downside, the data transfer rate for both these units is slow (maximum of 176 K/sec); this is below the threshhold for true MPC (multimedia PC) applications. SyDOS plans an upgrade interface card which would approximately double the transfer rate for its unit, but has no projected availability for it. The card connection is not even documented in the product manual. The access rate of 545 msec is fairly standard for the slower lower end CD-ROM players -- lower than currently fashionable "double-spin" drives but well within MPC specs. When testing the SyDOS drive we encountered one interesting "gotcha:" Users who run their printers through an A-B switchbox to select printers or computers will have a serious problem. Your machine won't be able to communicate with your printer through both the SyDOS and the switchbox interface. Parallel port communications degrade quickly over distance (the reason the SyDOS parallel cable is so short) and the two connections are too much. A direct connection with a 6 or 10' parallel cable has no problem, but test any longer cable runs as well. We had less trouble daisy-chaining MicroSolutions drives; we connected a MicroSolutions tape drive to the CD- ROM drive, then connected our laser printer to the tape drive. There was slight, but not greatly significant, degradation in the speed of tape backups, and nothing noticeable in printing. However, when we tested using the CD-ROM drive on our A-B switch connected to our bidirectional PIO port, the connected output device, our Polaroid Digital Palette film recorder, was unable to communicate -- though it will work through the switch absent the CD-ROM drive. Both drives takes the CD-ROM directly in the tray, which is both an advantage and a drawback. You don't need to take the extra bulk of caddies if you lack the storage, but you may put your CD-ROM disk more at risk by handling it. The SyDOS unit, like the MicroSolutions unit, is top- loading, and users should avoid putting anything on top of the device (not a problem for the MicroSolutions drive, where the unit rolls out for loading). The designers put an attractive curve on the top lid that subtly reinforces the point. You won't want to run any programs from these CD-ROM systems, nor is the data transfer rate up to playing video clips (sound clips, in .WAV format, play just fine, though), but they are a convenient way of acquiring programs and data for use on more speedy fixed or removable disk systems. [Don Jenner on the Procom SCSI CD-ROM drive] The Procom macCD is a premium product intended initially for Macintosh and PC-family users; it is one of a family of high-end top-speed CD-ROM drives offered by the company. PC-family users plug in using a PC-family SCSI card, with a different set of drivers. Procom makes such cards, and can supply suitable drivers for use with them; if you have someone else's SCSI board, you need suitable drivers from that vendor. We tested with both Procom and Always SCSI adapters; the Procom board worked extremely well (it is a fast buss-master board); we had good luck with the Always SCSI using the Always ASPI driver and Corel-SCSI's CD-ROM driver, but less with the native Always CD-ROM driver (Procom appears to be using a Toshiba drive, but not one of the models explicitly supported by Always). The Procom drive tested was an external unit; plug in power, set the SCSI ID if necessary, connect a SCSI cable and terminator and install the requisite software. If you don't already have SCSI, your problems will come from that part of the puzzle, more than the drive. Operating the drive is similarly simple. This drive uses a caddy -- effectively, the equivlent of the plastic case for a floppy drive. Put the CD in the caddy, open the drive door and slide the caddy in until the mechanism takes over and seats it in the drive. The caddy is ejected with a touch of a button. I am not terribly fond of caddies (only one comes with the unit, so CD handling is still an issue, unless one buys a lot of extra caddies). Installed with the Procom SCSI board and drivers, and the Always SCSI ASPI driver and Corel-SCSI CD-ROM driver, this system delivered full-motion video -- the most speed- sensitive task I can conceive -- as effectively as did both the fixed disk and the removable disks discussed above. The drive came with both stereo head phones and a set of low-end Labtech CD speakers; stereo sound at the computer bench was a nice feature. Using Windows' Media Player utility to control things, I could turn that on from the computer console, and run it in the background while working -- not a bad way to write about multimedia.... I had less success using Always' native CD-ROM device driver. The drive was correctly recognized and I could play video and digital sound files directly, but not through the Windows Media Player utility. Clearly, high-speed CD-ROM systems, typified by Procom's king-of-the-mountain models, offer very good multimedia support. Their strength is also their weakness: Using them requires working with SCSI, and that is far from trivial. On the other hand, SCSI seems to be a major standard in connecting a wide range of devices demanding speed input/output; biting that bullet may be a necessity. That decision taken, the only other caveat is to make sure that the drive one buys works with the SCSI board and drivers one buys. The simplest solution is to secure the SCSI setup from the same people who sell the drive. ### [Sidebar on SCSI] By and large, all mass-storage media connect to your system in one of three ways: IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) interfaces are commonplace fixed-disk connections; the SyDOS Marlin 105mb removable disk system tested also used this kind of connector. Increasingly, PIO (Parallel Input/Output) ports -- essentially a fully bi- directional variant of the standard printer port) are used for "plug and play" connections to external devices; we tested tape and CD-ROM systems using this standard. But by far the most flexible of the current interfaces is the SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) buss. SCSI has been around for quite awhile; it is a "grown up" version of the SASI (Shugart Associates System Interface) connection developed in the early days of microcomputers. The beauty of SCSI in its present incarnation is its ability to connect a wide range of very different devices -- commonly, up to seven of them -- at relatively fast throughput rates, through a single slot on the microcomputer system buss. The downside to SCSI is a certain degree of complexity: To assure a reliable signal across the buss, each device must be properly identified and each end of the SCSI buss cabling needs to be properly terminated. Since SCSI is, in most cases (NEC's Image systems, with built-in SCSI, are notable exceptions), "foreign" to your computer, it is necessary to inform your system about SCSI devices through hardware drivers. The complexity used to make SCSI implementation somewhat painful; the current popularity of SCSI as a high-end interface standard has resulted in dramatic simplification. Corel Corp., in fact, has been a major mover in that simplification. The basic item needed for SCSI interfacing is a SCSI card. These are commonly available at a range of price- points and capabilities. In many cases, if you buy a device requiring a SCSI connection, the vendor supplies at least a simple SCSI card. Alternatively, if you have bought a high- end system (see our definition in July's Corel Magazine), you will very likely already have a SCSI device interface to support a big, fast hard drive. If you decide to buy a full-featured SCSI card, your choices range from low-cost 8-bit SCSI cards to very high- end EISA and MCA buss-mastering SCSI cards, from a number of vendors. These vendors can be grouped in two classes: those who have adopted the ASPI (Advanced SCSI Programming Interface) standard, and those who are pursuing a different standard. Our current prejudice is for ASPI-compliant SCSI; we are seeing more devices supplied with ASPI-compliant drivers than otherwise. As you might guess, the fact that Corel Corp. makes a truly effective, Windows-based SCSI management software package (available in the cheap-software stores as Corel SCSI; list price: $99) that is ASPI- compliant, strengthens the inclination. Quite a few vendors play in the ASPI-compliant SCSI- card market; Adaptec is by far the most visible. However, we chose to set up our more powerful bench system with an Always IN-2000 16-bit SCSI adapter. We also tested Procom's ISA "buss master" SCSI Xelerator card. The most forceful reason for installing an Always SCSI card was a strong recommendation from Dr. Peter Wai, the technical guru at Xylon Research (formerly Accutron, Inc.), the folks who did the actual system-building. Dr. Peter opines that the Always card delivers better performance than the Adaptec 1742A adapter I had originally suggested. Certainly, it is no slowcoach; connection to a 900mb Toshiba drive, the throughput is astonishing. Second, the Always card is modestly priced; the suggested retail price is $200 ($300 bundled with Corel SCSI software) and street-pricing should be a 25 to 35 percent less. Third, Always has a close working relationship with Corel Corp.. As it happens, I installed an 8-bit Corel SCSI card (the LS-2000) in our mid-range 486 machine; it turns out that Always now manufactures that card (using a different model number. This means interchangeable cables and similar conveniences -- as well as a single technical support source. And for the record, a conversation with Always suggests that they give very good support. There are equally good reasons for using a more complex card such as that from Procom. Again, this is a company that does a superior job in support -- you should take it from my comments on this, that you will likely need some hand-holding as you put SCSI in your system. The Procom board offers more options for configuring the system from on-board software, and is in general a more able board. There is a new variant on the SCSI theme -- SCSI2, with a "FastSCSI" component. Procom's Xelerator, among others, implements such elements of that standard- still-in-the-making as are presently clear. The Procom board, then, represents a fairly high-end adapter (as the Always IN2000 is representative of mid-range SCSI boards, and the now-venerable Corel LS-2000 represents entry-level products). SCSI cards generally handle fixed disks directly with on-board software; other devices (tape drives, optical drives, CD-ROMs and, interestingly, some scanners) interface either through card-specific drivers or through the card- vendor's ASPI driver. Since ASPI is a published specification, any peripheral vendor writes one driver for for ASPI and is automatically (so goes the theory) compliant with all ASPI-compliant SCSI cards. You install the ASPI driver once, and subsequent devices install accordingly. Managing the process is simplified through Corel Corp.'s very well reviewed -- rightly -- SCSI software. That management is essential: The more devices that come into play, taking advantage of SCSI flexibility, the more complex the system becomes (which is what you pay for flexibility...). The more able the SCSI adapter, the more flexible it is, and the more complex the management chore. SCSI represents a very powerful way to extend system connectivity, supporting both peripherals mounted in the system unit and those which are separately housed. It is a single-slot solution to connectivity -- a blessing when one simply has no more slots, which is not uncommonly the case for high-end graphics-capable systems. It involves some serious work to get it working perfectly (addressing issues can be particularly nasty); the solution to this problem lies in more general application of the configuration-in- software approach pioneered by IBM's MicroChannel Architecture and implemented less often in EISA systems (where the tendency is to use older, dumber boards, requiring dipswitch and jumper settings). ### [Sidebar on tape drives] Short of punchcards, tape must be the oldest storage medium used in computers. Even so, this venerable standard seems to hold its own even with the advance of more convenient removable-disk options. Clearly, tape plays strongest as a backup medium -- and backups are something more of us should do, more often than we do it. Tape drives come in several flavors, depending on the kind of tape used and the way they plug into your system, among other things. The unit tested was MicroSolutions' Backpack quarter-inch drive. I sought this one out as representative of the breed for a number of reasons: First, this is a parallel-port plug-and-play device; installation consists of unpacking the unit, plugging in a powerpack and running the data cable to a printer port. Second, quarter- inch drives and mini-tapes are good deal smaller than older data cartridge formats, while not being so dear as DAT tape systems. At the same time, a DC2120 quarter-inch tape cartridge (costing around $15.00) stores 250mb of compressed data; one cartridge is sufficient to back up most mid-range system fixed disks, and three or four will do the job for the high-end user with far too much stuff on her or his disk. Third, MicroSolutions is a pleasant company to deal with -- including the tech support people; they give good answers to tough questions (I checked...). As you might gather, setting up the MicroSolutions tape drive was simple; I plugged it in to the port that usually carries the laser print, and used the Backpack drive's printer-port pass-through to "daisy chain." The software installation was equally simple -- the software consists of the backup-to-tape program and the associated helpfile. There are no special drivers or other modifications to be added to the CONFIG.SYS. Performance was more than satisfactory, in all but one case. Testing this with the low-end 386 system, a complete backup of the stacked (compressed) drive of about 160mb was accomplished in just shy of an hour, complete with compression and verification. On the substantially faster high-end system, 250mb took only about an hour and ten minutes -- again, compressing the data and verifying it (and the verification works -- the backup software found a glitch in the backup, and corrected it). Just to see if the system could be stopped cold, I ran a backup of the mid-range 486 system across our Artisoft Lantastic 2mbps network. Backing up across a network used to be a painful experience (and no small issue when it came to setting things up). The MicroSolutions Backpack tape system had no trouble at all backing up the 100mb on the remote system, at speeds only a little slower than local connection demonstrated. In fact, the backup software was writing data to tape as fast as it could receive it from disk, in the case of both 486 test environments. The one flaw in this otherwise perfect record came about in capturing some data on an ancient 286 system now being retired. Apparently, in the process of compressing and writing to tape, something was not quite right, and it was impossible to restore the files from that data set. This was clearly worrisome, since a backup tape that can't be restored is worse than useless -- an opinion in which MicroSolutions tech support concurs. The company quickly recommended the use of a newer version of the software, with improved compression and verification capabilities, still in beta testing at press-time but about to be released as version 2.0 of BPBACKUP. In the couple dozen test backups we ran, this occurred only once; while not trivial, the correction is in place. The MicroSolutions Backpack tape system lists for $539; expect to pay between $400-$450 in the deep-discount stores. Internal 250mb tape drives in this format (requiring an internal adapter) are less costly ($275-$300) but more troublesome to install. If your disk capacity exceeds 100mb (commonly the case with graphics users), backing up to floppy disk is too complicated and arduous to be done regularly; if your data is your business, you'd better have a backup; a plug-and-play unit like the Backpack is a good investment. ### Total for text & two sidebars: Approximately 5800 words Press Contacts: MicroSolutions Mike Mackey 815-756-3411 SyDOS Bill Quinn 407-998-5400 Syquest Joel Levine 510-226-4000 Always Roger Mabon 818-597-9595 Procom Joe Lagana 800-800-8600 x368