Re: cd rom player

[Ed Murphy]

--- Marten van de Kraats <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> How fast a cd rom player can a vintage Mac handle? I've a IIfx, a 
> IIci, a Quad 700 and a Quad 840av. I've got 2 cd rom players (one 
> sits inside the Quad 840av), but I'm not very much inpressed by the 
> speed of this beast... The 840av itself is pleasantly speedy, but the
> 
> cd player is slow. Copying the contents over ethernet goes faster... 
> That just doesn't seem right to me.

The cd-rom's maximum speed will 150 kps times it's rated max.  So if it
is a 4x cd-rom, then it's maximum transfer rate is 600 kilobytes per
second.  10baseT Ethernet is generally has a greater transfer rate than
older cd-roms up to about 8x.  In addition, the Mac file system is
somewhat inefficient, especially on cd-roms.  The OS may need to seek
around the cd-rom, which is very slow (up to 1 second average seek time
on older CD-ROMS).  

When you move the contents to the hard drive, then do the copy, you are
drastically decreasing the seek times and probably increasing the
transfer rate from the drive.  At that point, the network connection
would be the bottleneck.

=
-
Ed Murphy
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

__
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com

-- 
Vintage Macs is sponsored by  and...

 Small Dog Electronicshttp://www.smalldog.com   | Enter To Win A |
 -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299   |  Free iBook!   |

  Support Low End Mac 

Vintage Macs list info: 
The FAQ:
Send list messages to:  
To unsubscribe, email:  
For digest mode, email: 
Subscription questions: 
Archive: 

Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com

Re: cd rom player

[the pickle]

At 23:18 +0200 on 12/08/02, Marten van de Kraats wrote:

>How fast a cd rom player can a vintage Mac handle? I've a IIfx, a
>IIci, a Quad 700 and a Quad 840av. I've got 2 cd rom players (one
>sits inside the Quad 840av), but I'm not very much inpressed by the
>speed of this beast... The 840av itself is pleasantly speedy, but the
>cd player is slow. Copying the contents over ethernet goes faster...
>That just doesn't seem right to me.

Keep in mind the SCSI in most pre-PPC Macs* can't do any more than about 5MBps
real-world speeds, which is...hrmmm...I forget what the conversion is exactly -
150KBps = 1x CD-ROM?  That'd make 5MBps a 33x CD-ROM, but most CD-ROMs past 16x
are rated on their *max* transfer rate, not their *average* transfer rate.  I
dunno...prly won't be overkill to stick a 24x drive on there, but I have my
doubts about how much better 24x drives are than, say, 8x drives even on Macs
that have no problem handling those SCSI speeds.

*Most can't even do 5MBps and are limited to more in the region of 2MBps or so.
-- 

the pickle

FAQ 

Software Archive


_

-- 
Vintage Macs is sponsored by  and...

 Small Dog Electronicshttp://www.smalldog.com   | Enter To Win A |
 -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299   |  Free iBook!   |

  Support Low End Mac 

Vintage Macs list info: 
The FAQ:
Send list messages to:  
To unsubscribe, email:  
For digest mode, email: 
Subscription questions: 
Archive: 

Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com