newton@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Mike Newton) (07/24/87)
I recently bought a Easy Drive 30 and have some comments and hints for
other users of this drive (and possibly other drives as well).
First, a couple of days after installing it I had the same problem that
grayson@cartan.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Matthew Grayson) had --- the drive just
would not show up on booting. His suggestion (made for the Dataframe series
of drives also solved my problem:
Hit SHIFT-OPTION-COMMAND and select the Control Panel.
Then answer Yes to the clear PRAM message.
Next a comment on the Easy Drive timings: on the suggestion of Tim Smith,
I formatted the drives with various interleaves and ran disktimer2 on
the various formattings: (all are with MacII, 1 meg Ram, NEC Color monitor)
Interleave Read Write Seek
1:1 44 458 31
1:2 77 455 31
1:3 109 116 31
1:4 142 146 31
Note that the drive came configured at 1:4 (the manual only mentions the
MacPlus, so this is probably the best setup for this machine). I
eventually decided on 1:3, though gave serious thoughts of having very
fast reads for the slow writes. On real data 1:1 might actually be
better. Does anyone have any comments on this?
Finally, a comment on Mac software and the Mac 2 -- a lot of programs that
I have tried would bomb. However, If I would go to the control panel and
reconfigure to 'B&W' and '2 grey scale' (rather than color and 256) many
of them started working.
- mike
newton@csvax.caltech.edu {ucbvax!cithep,amdahl}!cit-vax!newton
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