davis@clocs.cs.unc.edu (Mark Davis) (02/24/89)
A recent posting made me wonder why it was necessary to use third party disk drivers in many cases. (Speedstore, Disk Manager) For example: In article <213400034@s.cs.uiuc.edu> carroll@s.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > ... >Last September I bought a Zeos '386 16MHZ Tower system with a 65M ST277R >drive, Adaptec 2372 RLL Controller, 1 M memory, 64K cache, 1.2 5.25" floppy, >and 1.44M 3.25" drive. > >I stuck a Micropolis 1335 (71M MFM, 109 RLL) in, even though it wasn't RLL >rated, and it worked. Life was rosy. About 2 weeks ago, I got SpeedStor, >and I switched the machine from the Adaptec drivers to SpeedStor, on the >promise of more disk throughput. > ... First, Alan, I have no idea about your problem. I suspect that you have found a bug in the drivers that surfaced because you are pushing two drives on the same controller so hard, but that is just a SWAG. (Can DOS handle outstanding I/O requestes on two different drives at the same time?) My real question is why bother with Speedstor. You must have gotten 3.3 with your machine. It will handle 4 partitions of 32 Meg each on any drive, so you will not have any trouble with the Micropolis 1335. (I know, if you have a MAXTOR 4760 you will have to do something, but I have not seen many disks that big yet.) As long as you can get your disk low level formatted and FDISKed, why bother with non standard drivers. (A good way to find bugs, like in XCOPY or PC-TOOLS or ...) As near as I can tell, the only thing you buy by using Speedstor drivers is to have a single large partition and your files can be 64Meg long instead of 32Meg. You may trade performance (I have heard reports that speedstor slows stuff down somewhat) and compatibility. Of course, with DOS 4.0 you get this all built into the OS anyway. A similar issue comes up with RLL drives. Why let the controller fool the DOS about the number of sectors and cylinders. Can't DOS (after 3 something) handle any combinations of sectors and cylinders (as long as cylinders is ss than 1024). Please don't misunderstand me: I am not trying to run down Speedstor or its competitors and I don't mean to criticize Alan (I wish I had his system and the idea of putting the directory on a differrent disk is really neat), but I don't understand why bother with these proprietary drives if it can be avoided. Thanks - Mark (davis@cs.unc.edu or uunet!mcnc!davis)