[comp.sys.next] Fujitsu hard disks

louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) (01/25/91)

In article <1564@van-bc.wimsey.bc.ca> jchin@van-bc.wimsey.bc.ca (Joseph Chin) writes:
>There have been much discussions at comp.sys.next about the Fujitsu M2263S
>SCSI hard drive (approx. 600MB formatted). Here's my summary:

[...]

>CON:

>-Below average performance (on the NeXT): my Micropolis 1588-15 scored a
>transfer rate of greater than 1.2MB/second, similar capacity WRENs and
>Miniscribes got around 900KB/second.

>-Difficulties encountered in setting it up. This may differ for other
>computer systems. There were much confusion over the proper jumper settings
>and how to get the drive to boot.

The performance difference might be related to both the default sector
size (512 bytes) and that I think synchronous transfers are disabled.
I suppose there is a way to reformat the drive for 1024 byte sectors
which might give some improvement.  Does anyone know if indeed
synchronous transfers are disabled when setting the jumpers in the
recommended configuration, and why?  I thought that the SCSI
controller on the NeXT supports synchronous transfers.

I'm interested because I would very much like to pick up one of these drives
for my NeXTstation.

louie