The reward for the extra effort required to install the
EIDE version is substantially higher performance.
Product: SyQuest SparQ
For: Windows 3.1 or higher, Windows 95/98, Windows NT 4.0 (an iMac version was due in Nov. 98, but did not appear due to the fact that SyQuest entered bankruptcy in Nov. '98. See the bottom of this file for additional details.)
Price: US$199 (EIDE version tested; iMac version US$249)
Pros: inexpensive removable storage unit with 1GB media for not much more than the cost of a 100MB Zip drive. Automatically supported by most OSes as a standard IDE drive.
Cons: No IDE cable or drive rails supplied. The "sleep mode" function of the included utility software is not supported on the SparQ. Problems may be encountered on systems with a SCSI boot drive. One of our SparQ discs suffered a serious crash resulting in catastrophic data loss after about six months of heavy use -- we are less inclined to recommend SparQ drives or rely on their media after this little disaster. Tech support may be limited, in lieu of SyQuest's financial troubles.
Strongest Competitors: Iomega Jaz; Castlewood System Inc.'s US$199 ORB (2.1GB removable disk drive).
A one-gig removable media drive for a little more than the cost of a Zip? Faster than a Zip, too? Sounds good!
We had a choice of testing Enhanced IDE (internal) or parallel (external) versions of the SparQ. (Unfortunately, no SCSI version is planned.) The external parallel version is, of course, more convenient to install, but a quick look at the comparative specs of the two models cinched our decision to go with the EIDE version. It is capable of a maximum EIDE burst rate of 16.6MB/sec. The parallel version can only attain a burst rate of 2.0 MB/sec. In real-world numbers, this means that the parallel version is capable of 1.25 MB/sec, while the EIDE version can achieve a maximum transfer rate of 6.9MB/sec. Thus, the following report is based on our experience with the EIDE version. Users of portable computers will have to put up with the lower throughput of the parallel version.
Installing the drive
Being an internal drive, we had to open our computer and decide whether to install the SparQ into a 5.25" drive bay or remove its mounting chassis and slide it into a 3.5" floppy drive bay. As the package lacked drive rails and the ones we scrounged up didn't seem to fit very well, we elected to put it into our second floppy bay.
Of course, installing an internal EIDE device is a bit more complicated than plugging in a parallel cable. Fortunately, SyQuest provides very clear instructions and, once we got over the package's lack of an IDE cable, we simply read through the instructions on when to set the jumper on the drive to Master or Slave (on our system, we didn't need to change the default configuration), plugged in the cable to the EIDE pins on the motherboard and drive (being careful to orient the red stripe on the cable with the clearly marked pin 1 on the drive), connected the power and switched on the machine. Guess what? It worked! Win98 recognized the drive correctly even before we installed any of the software SyQuest supplies on the Starter disc (which, by the way, only has 272MB free).
Windows 95 may have a few additional steps to perform to get the drive up and running. Step 1 of the installation instructions that come with the IDE SparQ directs Windows 95 users to run ADDIDE95 from the installation diskette. Part of what that program does is invoke a file called remideup.exe, which is included on the installation diskette, as well the Starter cart.
Remideup.exe addresses an important limitation of Windows 95 – and one that affects other removable storage drives, such as Zip drives, too. Simply put, without it, removable IDE disk drives are not fully supported by the IDE drivers included with Windows 95. Fortunately, this problem is fixed in Windows 98.
Here’s an example of how the Win95 problem manifests. If you insert a cartridge with, say, 850MB of data on it after starting up Windows, Explorer will report 150MB free. If you then remove that cartridge and insert a blank cartridge with 1 GB free. Explorer still reports 150Mb free, even after refreshing the display with the F5 key. Although "Disk Properties" will report the proper amount of free disk space, an attempt to copy more than 150 MB of data to the new disk will fail (!) with a disk full error. Without remideup.exe, the only solution to get it work properly is to reboot or perform a complete scandisk on the cartridge. (In addition to being provided on the SparQ disk, the Remideup.exe removable IDE media update to Win95 is freely downloadable from Microsoft's support site at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q153/4/71.asp.) This solved our problems with this "feature" of Win95.
See the Microsoft article Problems with Removable IDE Drives in Windows 95 for more info on situations that may occur you are using certain removable IDE disk drives in Windows 95, one or more of the following symptoms may occur: - The removable drive is not detected or not accessible within Windows 95, or media changes, such as removing a disk and inserting a disk, do not produce expected results.
As mentioned above, the "sleep mode" function of the included utility software is not supported on the SparQ. In fact, the so-called "SparQ Tools"are actually for the company’s SyJet drive, and not all of their features are available on the SparQ. Although various reports on Usenet complain that the drive makes a disconcertingly loud buzzing noise when accessed and that clicks can be heard when the drive is not in use, we didn't find these issues to be problematic. Perhaps those blessed with very, very quiet power supply fans might have more concern.
It’s also worth mentioning that the SparQ, with its US $33 1-gig disks, offers a better cost per megabyte ratio than that of the Iomega Jaz or Zip drives. However, Castlewood System Inc.'s US$199 ORB, a 2.1GB removable disk drive with replacement cartridges selling for US$30, is a bargain. As always, we recommend checking your local retailers to see if you can obtain media and service on a "bargain" before plunking your cash down. The SparQ carries a one-year warranty; SparQ media is guaranteed for five years. Of course, that's much consolation if you lose your work. in fact, our oldest SparQ disc suffered a serious crash resulting in catastophic data loss after about six months of heavy use -- we are less inclined to recommend SparQ drives or rely on their media after this little disaster.
Tech Support
On one of the systems we tested the drive on, we used a configuration without an IDE boot device (our boot drive was a SCSI unit) not specifically mentioned in the SparQ's documentation. Predictably, we had trouble.
Our system configuration was as follows:
Primary hard drive (boot device) = SCSI, under control of an Adaptec SCSI controller.
Secondary master device = IDE CD-ROM drive.
No other hard drives.
We tried every combo of master and slave and every combo of IDE auto detection we could think of, to no avail. The only setting which even allowed Win95/98 to boot was setting CMOS drive setup to NONE. Then the drive showed up, but couldn't be accessed or ejected.
Although SyQuest's instructions (problem #2, "solution" #4) certainly suggested that this combo (SparQ set to be MASTER on the primary IDE controller) should work, our system hung just after initializing the SCSI drive's BIOS. In short, this setup is not supported.
On another system, booting from a standard EIDE hard drive set as the Secondary Master, with a CD-ROM drive configured as the Primary Slave, adding the SparQ to the same cable as the CD-ROM drive made the system attempt to boot from the Primary Master -- the SparQ. Because our SparQ disk was not bootable, this, too, failed. Fortunately, the solution was simple: we just powered off, swapped the positions of the two IDE cables on the motherboard and everything worked. Our system's BIOS automatically recognized the presence of the new drive, Win98 recognized the drives as a Generic IDE drive and away it went. Users of older PCs may need to manually configure the drive's configuration parameters.
SyQuest’s tech support via email was both fast and efficient when we called. Sadly, this situation changed for the worse in the aftermath of the company's financial problems. See the company's website at www.syquest.com (if it is working when you read this -- it wasn't on Nov. 10th) for updated info on possible tech support options.
We also found the alt.syquest and comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Newsgroups to be valuable sources of tech support info. There, you'll find messages from helpful users on how to configure the SparQ drive in your system’s BIOS more efficiently than the method SyQuest recommends.
As the Usenet messages stated, settings of User, 1944, 16, 63 and AUTO work much better on some systems than SyQuest’s recommended settings. The company says to set LBA to "Yes" and cylinders to 1945, heads to 16 and sectors to 63. Using these settings, however, the BIOS may time out before the drive is recognized on some systems. As mentioned earlier, most modern PCS have automatic IDE drive detection and setup features that make such manual fiddling unnecessary.
Tech Tips for Users of SparQ and Other Removable Storage Devices
Problem: "Unable to find SyQuest drive. Unable to use either an ASPI driver or INT13 to access the drive".
Solution: Go to Control Panel / System. Switch to Device Manager and open Disk Drives. Look for the SparQ. Mark it and click on Properties. Switch to Settings tab. Make sure there is a marker next to removable. Alternately, you could add Winaspi.dll to your windows\system directory.
Question: Why is INT13 ghosted?
Answer: The INT 13 box is grayed out (ghosted) if your bios is controlling the device.
Problem: SparQ cannot be found by BIOS; SyQuest utilities don’t work.
Solution: Set the CMOS secondary master to "Auto." The SparQ will then seen by BIOS and the SyQuest utilities will work.
Assuming the SparQ is listed in Device Manager under "Disk drives" (it might just be listed as "IDE drive" or some such), just click on the drive and select Properties/Settings.Then make sure there is a checkmark next to "Auto insert notification". This is how Win95 and Explorer know you've changed a disk and that it has to reread the FAT table from the new disk prior to attempting a write.
Is that new IDE drive locking up your system? Try going into the BIOS settings at bootup and disabling bus mastering on the IDE port the SparQ's attached to. One Win95 OSR2 user on Usenet reported that he had to upgrade his bus master drivers, run remideup.exe again, and add a removableide=true statement to system.ini. After doing the above things, he says, the drive came up. He was then able to put a check next to the word "removable" in the device manager’s Drive properties and reboot.
Parallel Port Issues
The parallel port version of the SparQ is the same standard ATA mechanism as supplied with the EIDE version of the drive, with an extra Shuttletech "EPAT" adapter and, of course, and external case, cable and power supply. In general, we don’t recommend parallel port storage devices. We’ve seen many problems, such as conflicts with printers, tape backups or other parallel devices. For example, combining a SparQ Drive, Microtek E6 Scanner, and an HP Deskjet 560 printer is a combination known not to work. The easiest solution is to add a second parallel port. Most single parallel port i/o cards support only IRQs 5 and 7. (The SIIG Dual Parallel Pro card allows you to disable the second port on the card so you only need one IRQ, and gives you a choice of IRQs 3-5, 7, 9-12, and 15.)
However, if you are out of slots and/or IRQs, a high quality A/B parallel switch box should allow you to run the SparQ without problems.
IRQ problems may crop up, too. In the case of the SparQ, the Parallel port version of the drive uses IRQ 7. Thus, you may encounter a problem if another device in your system such as a sound card, modem or scanner uses the same IRQ. The solution, according to SyQuest Tech-support, is to avoid the use of IRQ 7 in these devices.
Note that some parallel port devices, such as the Iomega Ditto Max, are not compatible with ECP parallel ports. You have to go into your BIOS and set the parallel port to either bidirectional or, in some cases, EPP mode.
See our review of the parallel-connected HP 7110e CDWriter drive at www.tcp.ca/gsb/reviews for more info.
Linux, etc.
Although the SparQ is claimed to be compatible only with Windows systems, the SparQ internal is a standard ATAPI (IDE) device that can be accessed under Linux as a hard drive (as can any other ATAPI drive like the Zip, ORB, etc.). The parallel port version should work with the 'ep' driver for Linux available at http://www.torque.net/linux-pp.html.
Glossary
EIDE - Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics - a mass storage device, usually a hard drive, standard in most of today's PCs.
SCSI - Small Computer Systems Interface
Jan. '99 update:
According to News.com, SyQuest is up for sale, with two suitors reportedly vying for the product rights. Additionally, News.com reports that some SyQuest warranty repairs now cost.)
Despite the fact that it is essentially a discontinued product from a defunct company, a SparQ is a handy addition to a PC for those who need quick and convenient access to files on removable media. However, we pity the saps that pre-ordered the USB version of the SparQ, once expected to ship in November 1998. -- it is unlikely they'll see their money, or the drive they ordered, anytime soon, despite a Jan. '99 report on News.com that Inter-Manufacturing Incorporated, based in San Jose, California, is now handling the company's repair work. At least until another company buys the product line or bails SyQuest out, don't expect an unending supply of SparQ media, either.
For further reading:
Related Articles
See also: SyQuest's product page: http://www.syquest.com/products/index.html
(Recent reports suggest that SyQuest's email and web site support is sporadic at best.)
Post new comment