lwm@iuvax.UUCP (11/30/84)
I wonder if anyone out there has heard of or encountered this problem. The system is an IBM portable PC with the hard disk expansion unit. It is being used to run mostly dbase2 applications under DOS 2.1. Not only does it seem SLOW, but data on the hard disk appears to be getting randomly corrupted. Garbage has appeared in source files and dbase records get corrupted or lost completely. One person has told me that the PC portable with the hard disk expansion unit is inherently slow and unreliable. He says that accessing the external hard disk is only about 15% as fast as an internal hard disk and that the expansion unit slows down all I/O. He also claims that the expansion interface is incompatible and unreliable when used with the portable, but is just fine when used with the regular PC. This sounds very strange to me, but it would explain the problem. Can anyone shed light on this? I find it hard to believe the hardware could be so buggy. The software maybe, but the hardware? I would expect the operating system to report disk errors if the hardware were at fault. Can anyone help? Larry Meehan uucp: ...ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!lwm csnet: lwm@Indiana ARPA: lwm.Indiana@CSnet-Relay usnail: Indiana University C. S. Dept. Lindley 101 Bloomington, IN 47405