[comp.sys.amiga] Need info re: hard disks

greg@isrnix.UUCP (Gregory Travis) (11/07/87)

I have a Xebec 20 Meg hard disk drive connected to my A1000.  I recently
saw an A2000 with an internal hard disk and was amazed at how it compared
(speed-wise) to mine.  The disk itself wasn't that much faster in terms of
seek time and the transfer rate was the same.  I assume that the controller
was commodore's DMA controller.  Mine is all PIO (-although I was led to
believe otherwise when I bought it-*sigh*) but I can't imagine that that makes
that much of a difference.  The software consists of tasks that run as
"SCSI.DEVICE" and "DH0" - which I assume is the AmigaDOS handler for it.
Is there any way to substitute the Commodore software (i.e. hd.device)?
I have mucho experience with PDP11s and how devices appear on the Unibus
but have no idea about how software communicates with disk controller hardware
on the Amiga - does the controller present itself in memory?  Are the
locations vendor-specific, or generic?  How about the commands?
If I could speed up this thing (right now it does about 30k/sec, which is
horrible) I would be really happy.
-- 
 Gregory R. Travis
 Institute for Social Research - Indiana University - Bloomington, IN 47405
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