nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu (John Nall) (10/05/90)
> From wjb@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu Thu Oct 4 12:50:41 1990 > To: nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu > Subject: Re: Minix with an ESDI disk > In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 04 Oct 90 13:52:57 +0000. > <9010041549.AA02508@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu> > Date: Thu, 04 Oct 90 12:55:20 EDT > > John, > > That is VERY interesting. I had been told that ESDI, MFM, and RLL > controllers were basically the same, but wanted confirmation of that. > What controller/disk did you use and did you have to make ANY changes to > Minix at all? You might consider posting the response to this message > as I expect others may be interested as well. Now, I may be able to > get rid of my 65 & 120 Megabyte RLL drives and get some REAL storage capacity. > > Bill Bogstad > > (As requested, this is posted rather than just replied to...) Bill: The controller is a WD1007V. I'm not absolutely sure who manufactures the disk itself (I'm at work, and it is at home), but the documentation on the controller states that it "interfaces two ESDI-compatible hard disk drives to a PC-AT system processor", so I guess it is pretty standard. No, I did not have to make any changes to Minix at all. I might add that my previous disk was an RLL, and 1.5.10 also ran on that with no changes. Since the first note, however, I *have* experienced one annoying problem. Dosread no longer works with the harddisk! It says "cluster size too big" and "Can't handle disk". Since I can transfer all my files using either the 1.2 meg floppy or the 1.44 meg floppy, this is not really a problem, but just a minor irration. I'll have to look at dosread.c later and see what is going on. -- John W. Nall | Supercomputation Computations Research Institute nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu | Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306 "Real programmers can write assembly code in any language." - Larry Wall
brucee@runxtsa.runx.oz.au (Bruce Evans) (10/07/90)
In article <959@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu (John Nall) writes: > The controller is a WD1007V. I'm not absolutely sure who manufactures I just got a system with a WD1007V-SE1 ESDI controller. It works. I configured it for a 150M drive with 35 sectors/track and 1223 cylinders. I'm using the patch to at_wini.c posted by ast. This probably doesn't matter. Performance under Minix is mediocre for reading (500K/sec for /dev/hd0 with 33MHz 386) and poor for writing (50K/sec). I have changed at_wini.c to work with raw devices and get 900K/sec for both reading and writing provided the block size is one cylinder. The raw disk is useless for normal use so more buffering will be required in the driver to improve the writing speed. First I will try the do_hvrdwt routine in 1.5.10-patch2-ST. >Dosread no longer works with the harddisk! It says "cluster size too big" and >"Can't handle disk". Since I can transfer all my files using either the 1.2 That's probably because you gave too much space to DOS :-) and got a DOS4 partition. These have extra fields in the parameters block that dosread does not know about. Two independent fixes have already been posted. -- Bruce Evans (evans@syd.dit.csiro.au)