Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

54
GRAPHICS
t the start of this year, Panasonic
announced a new dual-function
quad-speed CD-ROM drive. So
what? Well, it was a quad-speed CD-ROM
drive and - this is where it gets good - a
650Mb magneto optical drive all in the
same box, but for not that much more than
a standard quad-speed drive. The adverts
started appearing and eventually we got
one to look at for ourselves. So is it any
good?
Let's start with the way it is built. The
drive looks like any standard CD-ROM
drive from the outside with the exception of
the PO logo on the front panel. When you
open that panel you will notice another difference.
It has a tray within a tray kind of
affair, one for the PD cartridge and one for
a normal CD. Because of the height difference
between a standard CD and one of
these cartridges, this tray within a tray
thingy becomes necessary - the interior
tray moving upwards when it retracts if
there is a normal CD in it.
The PD cartridge itself actually shares
many of the same dimensions as a CDs
R O M caddy - which you should have
some familiarity with if you own an older
CD-ROM drive. However. the PD cartridge
will not work in caddy-based CD-ROM dnves
which is a great shame as it would
certainly put this drive into my all-time top
ten list of products.
SITTING PRETTY
The drive is nice and easy to install with
jumper-based termination (rather than
resistor packs which can be awkward to
remove and replace) and sits quite happily
in the top bay of my machine. Software
installation is certainly a lot less complicated
than the many disks of installation software
for the PC and Mac included in the
box would suggest.
If you are using an Amiga with a SCSI
interface built-in like an A3000, nothing
needs changing. However, the drive isn't
particularly happy with all controllers - it
does work on a GVP controller and also
on our A2091, but it didn't like the A4091
SCSI II controller we use in our A4000 at
work. U you do get it working then all you
need do is load up HDToolbox, or its
equivalent on your machine, and partition
the cartridge the same way you would with
any new hard drive. As for the CD-ROM
famoatibilitg
(ro55roads
It is a shame. as I already said, that the cartridge system isn't a little more
compatible. If it worked in the same way as standard MO drives there would at
least be some cross-'platform• compatibility. As it is, the only drive you can
read a PD cartridge in is Panasonic's own drive. It also has to be hoped that
the PD drive is going to be more compatible in the future with hard drive controllers.
Some of the SCSI controllers the PD drive does work with include the
GVP hard card, HiSolt's Squirrel controller the embedded SCSI controller in
A3000s and thus Commodore's own A2091, and the new Datanyer SCSI
controller for the Al200.
A
side of things, using AmiCDROM
is extremely simple and you can
set up the PD drive as a CD-ROM
unit with the same ease that you set up
the cartridge side of things.
How well does the drive perform?
According to Sysinfo the cartridge runs
along at a nice steady meg a second,
although copying files to and from the
drive in °Opus puts the lie to those figures.
In a test I did copying roughly 10Mbs
worth of 24-bit pictures, it look six minutes
and 40 seconds to write all 10Mbs to the
PD drive, and just one minute and 50 seconds
to copy them from the PD drive back
onto my hard drive (which. incidentally, is
rated as giving me a little over three
megabytes a second).
This obviously means that in real world
terms the drive only writes at about a meg
every 40 seconds. not quite as fast as
Sysinto suggests. On the plus side it does
mean that the drive reads at about a meg
every eleven seconds - still not a great
speed but at least better than its write
speed. I should point out, though, that the
speed for reads and writes does vary quite
a lot and is not always as slow as the figures
I have printed, The CD-ROM's speed
is a lot more predictable. Seeing that the
drive is supposed to be a quad-speed
• AM
Amiga Computing
OCTOBER 1995
/ drive, you'd expect to get around t
600ka secondmark.And,nosurpn
es here, that's exactly what you do get
In conclusion, I would have to say that
wouldn't use the Panasonic PD drive
an everyday replacement for a hard dri
but if you are going to use it for archiv
or as a final step before mastering a C
then this unit provides significant value f
ar money. For users out there that haven
yel bought a CD-ROM drive, it is perha
worth pe waiting for a bit and saving up t
extra cash to get your hands on an a
tional 664Mb of hard drive space at the
same time. As each additional 664Mb car
-tridge only costs fifty quid it remains pro
ably the cheapest way of beefing up yo
Amiga at the lowest possible cost
SYSTEM MUMS
RED :.,ential BLACK • Recommended
(eesesseireee)
vseessesesej
SCSI controller
The bottom line
Product: Panasonic PD drive
Price: 069,95
Supplier: HiC) Ltd.
Tel: 0181-909 2092
Ease of use 9
Implementation 8
Value for money 9
Overall 9