anon_twist wrote:I have a zulu scsi and it is quite fast. I've come across discussions online stating Gotek has much slower loading times. I think it has something to do with it emulating the floppy drive so it only goes at floppy drive speed, or so I've read.
It's not emulating the floppy drive that is the issue... the problem is the bus speed of the floppy drive.
Floppy disks can only spin so fast, and as a result the amount of data that can be transferred per second is quite small. With older computers every component was quite expensive, so there was no reason to put faster controllers in place for "theoretically faster" floppy drives, since they weren't designed for this. We all know that the Gotek drives, with the USB drive attached, can *theoretically* go faster, but the old floppy controllers in these devices cannot be upgraded to transfer data faster.
The SCSI bus, even if it is also an older standard, was designed to carry support much higher data rates because hard disk drives (among other applications) are able to spin faster, have denser storage capacity per platter, and you can read from multiple platters at the same time. To take advantage of these dynamics of scale, you need faster controllers, hence why SCSI has a faster transfer rate, because it is designed to handle more data per second.
Now a few things to consider. The base model MPC 60/S900/S950, all came only with the floppy controller as a means of storage. So yes, this was the "cheap" part that was used, and has bandwidth limitations. All of those devices had an add on adaptor/board, that the consumer needed to pay more for, so that they could get the SCSI interface hardware, as well as the software/firmware update that enabled these faster transfer rates. This wasn't a free upgrade for people, as SCSI transfer rates were not part of the base product... so you had to pay a pretty substantial sum to get the extra storage, since it required purchasing the SCSI board, a SCSI drive, and likely the appropriate cables to get everything to talk together.
