[net.micro.pc] sanyo 555

ditzel@ssc-bee.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) (02/13/85)

A friend of mine is interested in buying a sanyo 555. 

Question: does anyone in netland have any 
                   negative or positive feels on the machine (via personal
                   experience)?
Any information would be greatly appreciated.
                           Thanks in Advance,
                           Charles Ditzel
                           Boeing Aerospace
                           ...!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!ditzel

yosh@hou2e.UUCP (M.CHING) (02/13/85)

<>

I have a Sanyo on loan to me and I have the following comments:

	1) If your looking for an IBM PC compatible, forget it. Most
	   everything that runs on the PC will not run on the Sanyo.

	2) The Sanyo is slowwwwwwwwww. I believe that disk access is
	   not DMA driven and hence a pain to wait for.

	3) The Sanyo is cheap... so if your not looking to be in the
	   mainstream of PC computing, this might be the machine for
	   you.

					Dave Bloom
					Bell Labs, Holmdel

jchapman@watcgl.UUCP (john chapman) (02/14/85)

> <>
> 
> I have a Sanyo on loan to me and I have the following comments:
> 
> 	1) If your looking for an IBM PC compatible, forget it. Most
> 	   everything that runs on the PC will not run on the Sanyo.
> 
> 	2) The Sanyo is slowwwwwwwwww. I believe that disk access is
> 	   not DMA driven and hence a pain to wait for.
> 
> 	3) The Sanyo is cheap... so if your not looking to be in the
> 	   mainstream of PC computing, this might be the machine for
> 	   you.
> 
> 					Dave Bloom
> 					Bell Labs, Holmdel

 Regarding (2).  Why should DMA have anything to do with it?  To my
 knowledge MS-DOS does not allow IO/compute overlap - when your
 program does a disk request control does not return until the transfer
 is complete and the elapsed time for a disk transfer is not going
 to decrease because of DMA! DMA might help in the case of a hard
 disk since programmed io is not fast enough to keep up with disk
 transfer rates most non-dma controllers buffer a sector and then the
 device driver copies the buffer contents to wherever they are
 supposed to go - this does take noticably longer than DMA transfers.
 A more likely explanation for the slowness you percieve is either
 1. they supply slow drives (also single density will have a lower
    transfer rate than double density); or
 2. the basic clock speed is lower than the machines you are 
    inplicitly comparing the Sanyo to.
 
 A purely personal opinion : it is still more cost effective,
 particularily in the long run, to go with an IEEE696 (S100)
 system.