Clarence Wilkerson writes:

> The MBR-7 gives me slot switch times of about 7 seconds.

Yep. I tested it today and saw about 6.5 - 7 seconds for switching times
on the NEC 2x (MBR-7), and between 7.5 and 9 seconds switching for the
Pioneer 4x (DRM-624x). 

Since the current NetBSD probe stuff causes each disk to be loaded in
turn, this means there will be about a minute of waiting at boot time
(and another minute when you mount all of the disks)

> I get some timeouts on mounts, but not as bad as reported
> by others.

On that subject - at boottime, the probe properly identifies which slots
have disks installed on the Pioneer, but fails to do so reliably on the
NEC. As far as mounting, I never get an error from the Pioneer, but
always from the NEC (the first try after inserting a disk)

As far as transfer speed, using dd I did ascertain that both disks lived
up to their claims. The Pioneer claims to be 4.4x, and it does about
670KB/sec, while the NEC is 2x and does just under 300KB/sec.

   # dd if=/dev/rcd7a of=/dev/null bs=32768 count=1000
   1000+0 records in
   1000+0 records out
   32768000 bytes transferred in 49 secs (668734 bytes/sec)

   # dd if=/dev/rcd0a of=/dev/null bs=32768 count=1000
   1000+0 records in
   1000+0 records out
   32768000 bytes transferred in 110 secs (297890 bytes/sec)