) (11/25/88)
Hi,
Just to let everyone know, my Maxtor XT-2190 running in RLL
formatting mode is now working perfectly!!!! It is normally a 160 meg
drive in MFM mode, but in RLL, it formatted as 238meg!
Sorry for the delay, but I forgot to post this solution back in September.
I installed the disk back then and got the weird problems I described.
It might help someone else later, so I'll post it.... For a recap...
I was getting a weird recal sound during seeks on the Maxtor connected
to an Adaptech 4070 controller conversion board. It worked
perfectly otherwise in RLL mode, but the performance was really slow and
the noise was driving me crazy!!!
Well, here is the problem...I had it formatted for a seek step time
of 3.0 ms (ST506 mode). I set it to 28 microsec (ST-412 mode) and
the problem has gone away. It seems the disk would stop at every
cylinder during a seek and wait for 3 msecs for the heads to settle
before reading the cylinder markers, so a full disk seek was really doing
1000 single cylinder seeks.
It now works perfectly and flies!!!
One question for the group, when other people post Disktimer numbers
for their disks (I know Disktimer is not really good, no flames
please!), the read and write times are usually close to each other.
On mine, the write time is 3-4 times larger than the read time.
IE, others post Rd=363, Write=388, Seek=22
Mine is Rd=307, Write=1427, Seek=12
The drive is really fast, faster than my Apple 80mb internal in my Mac II.
I was just curious why this acts this way.
Phil Hunt