Plasmon UDO30I external SCSI Drive

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. The Drive
3. Reading Tests
4. Writing Tests
5. Conclusion

Plasmon UDO30I external SCSI Drive - Page 2

The Drive

The device comes with UDO drive resource CD, 68pin Micro-D wide SCSI cable, a SCSI terminator, power cable and two 30 GB UDO media, one rewritable and one write once read many (WORM).

On the front of the drive, there are from left to right, the UDO logo, the emergency eject hole and the eject button. Above it there are two leds, the left one is the active (Amber) and the right one is the ready (Green).

On the back of the drive from left to right there is the power switch below of the SCSI ID switch, two SCSI-III 68-pin Micro-D connectors above the AC power connector and the fan/air filter.

The Plasmon UDO30I SCSI drive features double sided 30GByte (15GB per side) storage on rewritable and write once media. It uses half height 5.25 inch form factor media cartridges, operating at Constant Angular Velocity (CAV) with continuous spin at the higher rate and communicate through a SCSI III connection.

Host/Interface	External Wide Ultra 2 LVD SCSI keyed 68 pin micro-D
Performance	Rotational Speed: 2160 rpm
	Media load time: 5 sec
	Media unload time: 3 sec
	Avg. seek time (1/3 full stroke): 35 ms
	Max. Read Transfer Rate: 8 MB/s
	Max. Write Transfer Rate: 4 MB/s (including verify)
Operation	Error Correction: Reed-Solomon
	Objective Lens Numerical Aperture: 0.7 NA
	Laser Wavelength: 405 nm
Reliability	MSBF: 750,000 load/unload cycles
Reliability	MTBF: 100,000 hours
Operating Conditions	Operating Temperature: 5 to 45C
	Operating Humidity: 5 to 90% RH (non-condensing)
	Drive Orientation: Horizontal or Vertical
Maximum SCSI transfer rate	40 MB/s
Buffer memory	32 MB
Dimensions&Weight	H 41.1 x W 146 x D 203 mm - 1.5 kg

- Installation

When the device was connected to our PC, it was identified as Disk drive "Plasmon UDO1 SCSI Optical Device" under WinXP. It is necessary first to install a hotfix patch prior to inserting the media into the drive. This step is needed because the UDO drive uses 8KB sector size for optimized read/write performance across a wide range of file sizes, which Windows does not support, even with Windows XP SP1.

The patch is supplied on the UDO drive resource CD. Next, we installed the Software Architects UDO driver Software, also on the resource CD.

Also, under drive properties, write mode tab, we selected cached write mode for increased performance, although direct write mode is the safe choice should the PC lose power or crash.

For our tests we are going to use only the RW cartridge as the Write once media unfortunately for us, was defective and the system did not recognize it.