burleigh@cica.cica.indiana.edu (Frank Burleigh) (11/29/89)
A colleague in my department will soon buy a Northgate 386 on which he will install DOS. Theoretically superior throughput suggests we get him an ESDI controller/disk pair, but his sense is that doing so gets him into disk sizes around 150MB, though I think this is not so. His reluctance to go to 150MB or so is his budget. My question: especially on Northgate 386 systems, what ESDI controller/drives in the range 80MB to 120MB do people like? My colleague has had problems with low end machines before, and is reluctant to get into anything "weird," so the more common the equipment, the better. Relatedly, how have people found Northgate about swapping out their 'standard' controller/disk pair in favor of something else? Does Northgate offer an ESDI controller/drive pair in the 80-120MB range? Please give me a sense of performance and pricing of your preferred pair. If there seems to be a concensus, I will summarize to the net. As this is a very specific query, please reply by e-mail. Your suggestions are appreciated. -- Frank Burleigh burleigh@cica.cica.indiana.edu USENET: ...rutgers!iuvax!cica!burleigh BITNET: BURLEIGH@IUBACS.BITNET Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405
pipkins@qmsseq.imagen.com (Jeff Pipkins) (12/01/89)
CompuAdd sells a HardCache ESDI controller card. It is a pluggable replacement for "normal" ESDI controllers, but it comes with 1MB of cache on board! You can get with 256K, expandable to 1MB, or better yet get it with 1MB expandable to 4MB! This is a tremendous advantage over all of the ramdisk and soft caching programs that eat up main system ram, takeover interrupts, and steal CPU cycles. The only thing on the con side is for existing users: it appears that anytime you change ESDI controllers, you have to low-level format again. No problem if the machine is new, and worth the trouble if you're switching. This board will read and buffer the whole track when you read one sector, so the next time you ask for a sector (if it's a sequential file it will probably be in the same track) it will be there. DOS 4.xx will do this in software, but why spend memory and CPU time? This board can even access both hard disk and floppy simultaneously. I always wondered why they didn't do that before... (Not connected with CompuAdd in any way, my views are my own, etc...)