[comp.sys.ibm.pc] Perstor comments wanted.

fordke@ingr.com (Keith Ford x8614) (03/01/90)

What do you know about the Perstor drive controller.  It discussed by
Jerry Pournelle in the latest issue of Byte magazine.  It will almost
double the amount of space on a hard disk.  Will it work with MFM,
RLL, SCSI, and ESDI?  What would it do to a Seagate ST277R-1 65Mb RLL
drive?
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keithe@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson) (03/02/90)

In article <9027@ingr.com> fordke@ingr.com (Keith Ford x8614) writes:
>What do you know about the Perstor drive controller.  It discussed by
>Jerry Pournelle in the latest issue of Byte magazine.  It will almost
>double the amount of space on a hard disk.  Will it work with MFM,
>RLL, SCSI, and ESDI?  What would it do to a Seagate ST277R-1 65Mb RLL
>drive?

We returned the Perstore ARLL (Advanced (?) RLL: does that answer the
"RLL,SCSI,ESDI?" question?) board we had in for evaluation: it would only
run at 2:1 interleave, and that's too slow.  They may have sped it up - this
was some time ago - but I haven't bothered to look at it again.

We prefer SCSI: a 15 Mbit/sec drive will usually turn in a CORE27 timing of
about 1.4 megabytes/sec transfer rate.  The 15 Mbit/sec ESDI do essentially
the same.  (This with Adaptec controllers: 1542A for SCSI; 2322B-8 for ESDI.
The only WD adapter I've tried was an EDSI that I _think_ wasn't rated for
15Mbit/sec, so the results aren't valid...)

kEITHe

Scott.Grabowski@ohiont.fidonet.org (Scott Grabowski) (03/04/90)

     Keith, if you decide to buy a Perstor board, I have one for sale. 
It is a PS180-8XT/AT (for an 8 bit XT).  I am selling it because there is 
and incompatibility problem with it in my machine.  I was using it on a 
277R-1 and it formatted fine.  Also, on another machine, the data 
transfer rate was ~275 Kb/s on a 4.7 Mhz XT.  However, I don't have the 
money to upgrade to a new machine, so I will just sell the Perstor.  It 
is just over 3 months old and I am asking $150.  If you want to make an 
offer, leave me personal E-mail because I don't check this conference 
that often.  Looking foward to hearing from you....
  
-Scott Grabowski



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larry@nstar.UUCP (Larry Snyder) (03/06/90)

In article <6991@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>, keithe@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson) writes:
> 
> We prefer SCSI: a 15 Mbit/sec drive will usually turn in a CORE27 timing of
> about 1.4 megabytes/sec transfer rate.  The 15 Mbit/sec ESDI do essentially
> the same.  (This with Adaptec controllers: 1542A for SCSI; 2322B-8 for ESDI.
> The only WD adapter I've tried was an EDSI that I _think_ wasn't rated for
> 15Mbit/sec, so the results aren't valid...)


Core test is a bad benchmark with SCSI drives due to the embedded buffing
on the drive.  The only true way to bench SCSI devices is by timing the
transfer of large blocks of data.

I also use a 1542A with a Miniscribe 9380S SCSI drive.  The drive is rather
slow - but throughput runs at 1.2 megabytes/sec under 386/ix.


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