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Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997 14:52:40 -0500
From: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com>
To: Charles Henrich <henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu>,
        "Paul T. Root" <proot@horton.iaces.com>
Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Zip drives horrendously slow
References: <19971219123840.34873@crh.cl.msu.edu>
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Charles Henrich:
 |Does anyone know of any zip drivers that are in user space, or behave
 |nicely in kernel space?  If I do a copy to a zip disk with the ppb
 |drivers the entire system goes into space, taking minutes to launch apps
 |and other fun stuff.  Any ideas on what I might be doing wrong, of if
 |this is "normal" ?

Paul T. Root:
 |The SCSI would have helped, but the ZIPs are still slow. Something like
 |35 msec. A better choice is the Syquest drives. They are all around
 |10msec (9-13 depending on which one). I have 2 EZ135s (one work, one
 |home) and my friend just bought a SyJet (1.5 gig) that he uses as the
 |boot disk, 1 for Win95, 1 for FreeBSD, etc...

I'm very satisified with the speed of my SCSI ZIP.  Pretty fast IMO.  

We should qualify that the Syquest may be a better choice for speed.  For
other concerns, not necessarily.  I've slipped and dropped a ZIP disk a few
times, but haven't winced and prayed; just picked it up.  The price of the
disks is nice as well.

 |I'm not complaining about the speed of the ZIP drive, Im complaining
 |about the fact that it takes FreeBSD down with it..  Maybe a userspace
 |zip package would be better suited to the task than a kernel driver.

I saw this same behavior when I was PLIPing between my two boxes here.  I
guess Ron's seen the same.  This was on and ECP/EPP-capable motherboard
parallel port BTW.

Randall