1 Jul
2010
1 Jul
'10
10:38 a.m.
On 7/1/10 12:58 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Absolutely; the decline started with the Zip drives. They are cute,
but terribly unreliable and generally a pain in the butt to deal with.
The Bernoullis were practically indestructible.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
For a time
about ten years ago, the 5.25" Bernoulli drives were
appearing at scrappers by the hundreds. I really regret not having
grabbed a drive or two. They'd be very handy now for PDP-11 hacking.
Even the 5.25" units were built like tanks. I still have a dual 90MB
unit here that occasionally sees use. The largest made was, what,
230MB?
I think the thing that doomed them was the price--they weren't cheap
and the bytes-per-buck got to be too low for competition.
The same with MO drives probably holds. I may still have a Pinnacle
Apex 4.3GB drive here somewhere. In addition to being somewhat
delicate, it was very expensive when compared to a standard IDE
drive.
I don't consider the later cheap removable-media drives like Zip,
Jaz, Sparq... to be in the same reliability category as the
Bernoullis. It's a shame that the technology was abandoned.