Smoke and Mirrors Issue 1 - Ya Gotta Have Drive
Ya Gotta Have Drive
by Arnold Slotnik
Copyright (c) 1993
Application programs have gotten bigger, particularly with the advent of Microsoft Windows as a major player. Packages like Paradox, Word for Windows, and Excel demand more memory and more disk space. Unless you were lucky enough to start out with a big hard disk, chances are you'll need an upgrade.
That's the situation I found myself in--my 42mb hard disk was just too full. I had to choose between applications, consigning some software to floppies on the shelf. What I needed was a second hard drive. That meant I had some choices to make.
Syquest makes a removable hard disk system with an SCSI interface. The cartridges come in 44- and 88mb sizes, and appear to your system to be exactly like a standard hard disk. It's an expensive proposition, though, with a 44mb internal model starting at about $450. The cartridges run about $90 each.
The cheapest alternative is to install a second standard hard drive. An 85mb hard drive is in the $180-$280 range. It entails a little more trouble in installation, though. With my system, jumpers would have to be changed on the existing controller to acknowledge the presence of the new drive, cables hooked up correctly, and all the hardware installed without tearing something up.
I'm a klutz, so I chose the third alternative. A Quantum HardCard is slightly more expensive than a standard hard drive, but it's much easier to install. After pulling off the system cover, all I had to do was slip the card into an open 16-bit slot, screw it into place, and put the cover back on. I then ran an installation program that installed a software driver (5K, loaded into upper memory), partitioned the drive, and formatted it for use. The HardCard added 85mb of storage to my system, took about fifteen minutes to install, and cost $269. It also comes in 42-, 127-, and 240mb sizes.
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