phil@diablo.amd.com (11/17/89)
I just installed a WD1006V-SR2 in my 286 AT. It's running two Seagate
disk drives, an ST-251-1 and an ST-4096 to provide 60 and 120
megabytes respectively (total 180 megabytes). Installation was very
easy. I was concerned about not having the right drive type in my
motherboard's BIOS ROMs but it turns out (I think) that the WD1006
BIOS ROM format program allows you to specify the drive geometry and
store it on the drive itself, and the BIOS uses that information
instead of the CMOS RAM/motherboard BIOS ROM drive type table.
I ran Spinrite II on the 4096 in its most intensive mode for many
hours, reading and writing over 20 gigabytes and only found 50
kilobytes worth of bad sectors. It is still a gamble as to the long
term reliability of this system but so far things look very good. The
new Spinrite II seems pretty neat in terms of supporting DOS 4.01 and
RLL but I wish it had a batch mode so I didn't have to sit through the
time-consuming initialization.
Nearly 800 kilobytes/second throughput.
I played around with the ROMU utility that was posted a while ago for
the purpose of editing drive type tables before I found out I didn't
need it but it seems quite buggy with regard to setting write
precompensation and such. Fortunately the new generation of disk
controllers have made all this nonsense irrelevant.
--
Phil Ngai, phil@diablo.amd.com {uunet,decwrl,ucbvax}!amdcad!phil
AT&T Unix System V.4: Berkeley Unix for 386 PCs!