HyperDrive availability and price

[Info-Mac]

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Subject: HyperDrive availability and price
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Date: Mon, 4-Feb-85 03:53:26 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.748
Posted: Mon Feb 4 03:53:26 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 7-Feb-85 07:34:19 EST
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Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: [email protected] (Dan Winkler)


The HyperDrive is by far the best hard disk we've seen for the Mac. It's
connected directly to the bus so it's FAST, faster than any external drive
and it allows the disk to be partitioned into several volumes so the finder
doesn't slip into a coma from the shock of encountering a 10 megabyte floppy
disk. Combined with the Manx Unix-like environment (csh, vi, make, grep, diff,
cc), this is a very nice development system. But when I went over to GCC, I
found out two problems:

1. The HyperDrive is still VERY expensive.

In fact, consortium schools and developers can buy a
complete Lisa 2/10 with a megabyte of RAM for the cost of
*upgrading* a 128K Mac to have a HyperDrive. So a
HyperDrive Mac ends up being as expensive as a 128k Mac
PLUS a megabyte Lisa 2/10. The cost of the HyperDrive
upgrade is $2795 if you already have a 128K Mac, $2195 if
you already have a 512K Mac. Now I'm not implying that a
Lisa 2/10 is anywhere near as good as a HyperDrive Mac for
development (it isn't -- it's much slower, especially to
boot which you do a lot when developing software), but it
makes you wonder.

2. Delivery time is about a month.

I went to GCC at the end of January and they told me
that if I ordered a HyperDrive that day I could have it
at the end of February. It seems that even with a high
price they are selling more HyperDrives than they can
build. This is understandable since there is no close
competition to their product, not even in Apple's Lisa 2/10.
But you can get 2/10's with no wait at all.

I've been comparing HyperDrive Macs to Lisa 2/10's but the 2/10's are
actually far inferior because:

1. Wrong aspect ratio.
2. No sound chip.
3. Extremely slow to boot (over a minute compared to HyperDrive's
few seconds).
4. Can't boot directly from hard disk -- need MacWorks floppy.
5. No multiple volumes so you'll only be able to make use of
a meg or two of the disk.
6. Disk connected through parallel port and so much slower than
HyperDrive.
7. Lousy keyboard, huge footprint.

(Lisa users please correct me if there's some way around any of these
problems or if you don't think they're significant problems or if there
are advantages I've missed. Also please tell me how to change the screen
brightness on a MacWorks Lisa.)

I don't think the 2/10's low price and quick availability are quite
enough to make up for these problems. On the other hand, I don't think
the HyperDrive's excellent performance is quite enough to make up for its
high price and slow availability.

One thing that might tip the balance in favor of the 2/10 as a
development machine is Apple's Object Pascal and expandable application
which are due real soon now and will run only on 2/10's at first.