SQ79%liverpool.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk (Mark Powell) (08/01/89)
Thanks for the previous info. on the Third Coast Technologies hard
drives. The hard drive I will eventually buy now seems to be either the
TCT one or a drive that I have recently seen advertised by Triangle.
Their 40 Meg. drive retails for about 429 pounds sterling. There doesn't
seem to be that much special about it, except that it is advertised as
being a "Turbo hard drive". They seek at 11ms, so I presume this is what
they mean by being turbo! What I would like to know from the net is anyones
experiences with hard drives made by Triangle and this drive in particular.
Also, a major factor IS IT ST MINIX COMPATIBLE???? As I've said before I'd
like to make sure of this fact before I fork out lots of green ones (well
gold ones now-adays.)
I know that seek rate is not the only factor governing drive speed, but
I thought a fast seek rate would be handy for Minix use, as minix is
generally reading a lot of small files and so needs to seek a lot.
If anybody has any info., I'd be pleased to hear about it.
Thanks in advance, to anyone who has.
Mark Powell
ARPAnet : sq79%liv.ac.uk@{ucl-cs.arpa,cs.ucl.ac.uk}
JANET : sq79@uk.ac.liv
USENET : ...!mcvax!ukc!liv.ac.uk!sq79Messenger.EuroPARC@xerox.com (08/02/89)
>What I would like to know from the net is anyones >experiences with hard drives made by Triangle and this drive in particular. >Also, a major factor IS IT ST MINIX COMPATIBLE???? I have an early Triangle 40Mb Turbo drive, and it doesn't even come close to working with Minix. This is the reason I've had to give up using Minix - I can't handle working from floppies, and I can't afford another disk drive. I spent 3 months trying to get the disk specs out of the manufacturers so that I could hack on the wini driver and maybe get it going, but they wouldn't let me have them. Unless anything has changed recently, I would suggest you steer clear of Triangle drives. Tell them I said so! Point out that my exact words were "I'm trying to do you a favour here guys - if I don't do this, Minix users won't buy your product." -- Hugh
Peter_Van_Epp@cc.sfu.ca (08/04/89)
>From: Messenger.EuroPARC@XEROX.COM >Subject: Re: Triangle turbo hard drives and MINIX > I have an early Triangle 40Mb Turbo drive, and it doesn't even come close > to working with Minix. This is the reason I've had to give up using Minix > - I can't handle working from floppies, and I can't afford another disk > drive. > I spent 3 months trying to get the disk specs out of the manufacturers so > that I could hack on the wini driver and maybe get it going, but they > wouldn't let me have them. Don't get mad, get even. By this I mean to say assuming that the drive is DOS compatible, they have given you the specs (assuming you are familiar with 8088 assembler which I assume you are to be hacking the wini driver!). I had a similar problem (except I didn't bother contacting the manufacturer!) with my Adaptec 2070A. It runs fine on /hd1 and /hd2 but failed miserably on /hd6 (I have a 60 meg drive that the controller splits as 2 30 meg drives DOS C: and D:). In order to get Minix running on /hd6 I resorted to that fine MSDOS utility DEBUG. The trick is to enter the following few lines with the debug "a" command and then trace / disassemble the bios prom on the controller board to figure out what commands are needed to control your drive. One trick that I found useful was to disassemble the code and then reassemble it in ram so that I could run at full speed and use break points. It takes a little time (and a little skill) but is certainly doable, and once it is done you can post the results to the net (as I intend to do for the Adaptec) so that the next guy can profit from your work. Another good bet is to issue a int 13 ah=08 command from DOS and see that number of cylinders and heads DOS thinks your drive contains (and by tracing the int 13 with DEBUG to figure out how it decided that,) which is part of what you need to modify the wini driver to talk to your disk. The code I typically start with is listed below. -a 100 mov ax,08 int 13 nop and then proceed using the t command (breakpoints won't work once you get into the controller rom area typically at c800:0000!) This happens to get the drive parameters but the same thing goes for reading or writing a sector (of course you should have a current backup of the disk before starting in case of accidents!). Good luck and hope to see your cdifs float by on the net! Peter_Van_Epp@cc.sfu.ca