[comp.sys.amiga] Help: Konika 10 meg floppy drive

michael@stb.info.com (Michael Gersten) (09/29/90)

I'd like to get some help in understanding these figures.

I've got a Konika 10 meg drive (without manual, unfortunately).
While playing with it and interleave for formatting, I found that
I was getting about 5 minutes to format the drive at interleave 0 or 1,
and increasing time at higher interleaves. I also saw about 3:20 - 3:30
per megabyte for read/write access, which is slow, but I attributed to 
the driver software and hardware (C-Ltd old [non-Kronus] board, version 3
software).

Last night I played with higher interleaves, however, and found that 
at 5, the read time dropped in half (1:15 per meg), and was best at
7 (:53 per meg). However, the formatting time was a wopping 11 minutes.

Now for the questions:
The drive spins at 300 rpm, so each track takes .2 sec/spin.
The drive is 350 X 30 X 2. Step time to adjacent tracks is around 30 msec.
This gives one cylinder every .43 seconds, or about
71440 bytes per second, theoretical. The best time I've seen is
formatting at interleave 0 for about 1/2 that
(35840 bytes per second). The best time I've been able to get
in a user process is another 1/2 of that
(18870 bytes per second).

So: 
Does anyone know what the actual interleave for this drive should be?
Is there any way to increase the performance of this unit?
Where can I get the programmers manual for this drive? Does anyone
have information on using C-ltd's SCSI driver to write a better
custom driver? (specifically, a replacement harddisk.device that
could take advantage of drive specific features)

Please reply directly, as I do not get either of these groups.
			Michael
			michael@stb.info.com
-- 
		Michael
michael@stb.info.com denwa!stb!michael anes.ucla.edu!stb!michael 
"Space is an illusion; disk space doubly so"