[Ham-Computers] SparQ computer back up FS

[George, W5YR]

Just to present the other side of the story, I recently won one of these
units as a door prize at a club meeting. It came with the Starter disc -
required for installation - and 3 others. After a tedious session with my
older W95 Pentium 133 MHz Micron laptop, the unit finally installed and
works great. It is an ideal match to the laptop with its enormous 2 GB HD!

So, don't sell them short. I think that it is well worth $30 if complete
and working properly and with the Starter disk.

BTW, the software would NOT install on a PIII W98SE system . . .

And, Trevor, these units do not use tapes - they use single platter storage
like a supersized ZIP drive platter. They are external disk drives - think
of them as slow external 1 GB ZIP drives.

73/72/oo, George W5YR - the Yellow Rose of Texas         
Fairview, TX 30 mi NE of Dallas in Collin county EM13qe   
Amateur Radio W5YR, in the 56th year and it just keeps getting better!
QRP-L 1373 NETXQRP 6 SOC 262 COG 8 FPQRP 404 TEN-X 11771 I-LINK 11735
Icom IC-756PRO #02121  Kachina 505 DSP  #91900556  Icom IC-765 #02437


Trevor Holyoak wrote:
> 
> Not to rain on your parade, but isn't $30 a bit expensive for obsolete
> technology?
> 
> A device running through a parallel port can't be "about a fast as a hard
> drive" (sic), unless you're comparing it to an *ancient* hard drive. Also 1
> GB is not nearly enough for backups these days, unless you are still using a
> hard drive smaller than 1 GB (in which case it may be the same speed as the
> tape drive). 8+)
> I don't think the tapes are even available anymore (if they are, they
> probably aren't cheap), so you'd be stuck with the one or two cartridges
> (you weren't very clear) that come with it.
> 
> If you're going to do backups to small capacity media, for around $50 you
> can get a good CD recorder that will backup 650 or 700 MB at a time
> (depending on the CDR capacity) to media that is readily available for less
> than $1 a piece.