chris@alberta (09/02/83)
There seems to be a few people out there who have used the Morrow M26 Hard Disk, so I'd like to ask a bit about it. I've used Morrow's DJ floppy controller in the past, and, although it worked perfectly, I didn't like their way of doing things (using the CPU for "DMA", stealing 1K out of my precious address space, etc.) So my question is this: do they do things the same way with their controller for the M26? Does it support the full S100 standard (24 bit addressing with priority controlled DMA)? Is it memory mapped? How much space does their driver take in the BIOS? Do they supply a full BIOS listing (my BIOS for the CompuPro Disk-I is hacked to support a 256K disk cache, so I would need the source to combine the two)? Chris Gray ...ubc-vision!alberta!chris
THOMPSON@usc-eclc@sri-unix.UUCP (09/07/83)
From: mark thompson <THOMPSON@usc-eclc>
I worked briefly with Morrow Designs on a little project, and had
to deal with their M26 and the bios that went with it.
First, let me say that they seem to be good, honest and helpful people.
Second, the bios is perfectly reasonable, though i have no experience
with the install program, and it could easilly be bad.
Third, the M26 itself has always worked pretty well, and never lost any
data. The interface works ok, also (the one i used was port-addressed,
not DMA). It was, however, VERY VERY VERY picky about the bus signals
that it would deal with (i had an old, clunky IMSAI mainframe, and a
rather bogus CPU). It would work in some slots, but not others. Since
i had such a kludgey system, this is considered normal behaviour.
-mark
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