U009@CCIW.BITNET (09/12/89)
I built up an external hard drive subsystem using 2 ST251 (non-R) drives and 2 Xebec 1310 SASI controllers, fed from a non-intelligent, homebrew AHDI-SCSI translator card. The system is used 95% for Spectre operations and the Mac side likes to have one drive per SCSI unit number, hence the two controllers. The problem is that disk operations seem to be quite slow. Not the actual transfers, just the interminable seeking the drives seem to do. The seek to track 0 sounds more like a re-calibrate than a seek: you can almost hear the steps. This is particularly anoying when all 3 partitions on a drive are open. I have counted about 8 recalibrates (or whatever) just to refresh the desktop after an application exits. Does anyone know if it is these controllers that have this habit or something else in the system? Is there no 'seek to track 0' or does it use any seek there as an excuse to recal? Is the only solution to go out and buy a couple of Adaptek (or other) more modern controllers? Regards, Stu Beal, VE3MWM, (U009@CCIW.BITNET), National Water Research Institute, Burlington, Ontario, Canada.