[comp.sys.ibm.pc] Help interpreting Coretest 2.8

greg@hpkslx.HP.COM (Greggory Orsini contractor) (01/18/90)

I'm running a copy of CORETEST 28 from simtel on my 386 20MHz system with a 
WD1006V-SR2 and a Maxtor 2190 (240megabyte, 18ms avg).

It shows about 634kbytes/second but the track to track is 40ms.  Did I miscon-
figure the drive, controller, computer?  Am I misinterpreting coretest?

Any help would be greatly appreciated to getting to the bottom of this.

Thanks, Greg.

charlie@csnz.co.nz (Charles Lear) (01/25/90)

In article <fatangfatang> greg@hpkslx.HP.COM (Greggory Orsini) writes:
>I'm running a copy of CORETEST 28 from simtel on my 386 20MHz system with a 
>WD1006V-SR2 and a Maxtor 2190 (240megabyte, 18ms avg).
>It shows about 634kbytes/second but the track to track is 40ms.

I have run into similar figures on other drives.  My Miniscribe 3180 157Mb
ESDI drive is rated at 16ms but returns 28ms on Coretest.

Some people I have asked have indicated that a lot of disk manufacturers
quote average access times for a 32MB partition, not for the entire disk...
this is borne out by the people who maintain that a good way to improve
your average access time on a disk is to split it into smaller partitions.

I find that a good cure for your worried feelings is to have a large
glass of very good, very old port, and reflect on the millions of plebs who
have to put up with 68ms Seagate drives... says he with narrowed eyes,
chalking one up for himself!

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trent@uncecs.edu (Glenn Jordan) (02/07/90)

 Regarding the 1024 cylinder DOS limit :
Ontrack used to distribute a TSR with Disk Manager version 3.3 called
SWBIOS.com that would allow access to all 1224 cylinders (if you had them).
They warn you in the docs that programs that use INT 13 low-level disk I/O
would bypass this scheme and overlap back to cylinder 0 or 1 instead of
1024 or 1025, trashing valuable things. I never used it, figuring it to 
be deadly, and it is GONE from the 4.0 version I saw recently. Has its
function been taken over by something else in Disk Manager 4.0, or did
they give it up as a bad job ?