wtm@uhura.neoucom.EDU (Bill Mayhew) (06/01/90)
The WD-1007V-SE2 controller, according to the documents I have is really a 15 meg/sec controller. I believe the key is that one must operate in the hard sectored mode on the drive for the controller to function corretly. The trick is trying to figure out how to strap the drive in its hard sectored configuration. The documentation (if any) for many hard drives is exceedingly fuzzy on the topic. Apparetnly, not all drives have the same number of sectors when they are in hard sector mode! I battled with a Siemens Megafile 300 and eventually gave up on using the Megafile 300 becuase I couldn't seem to get it to go into a hard sector mode by fiddling with jumpers on the drive. I called Siemens' computer products division in NJ, and they refused to talk to me, saying that it was a VAR problem, not their problem. I tried to explain that their drive had been donated by a benfactor, but they still said, "tough!". The only thing I could get out of them was that they thought a 1006 controller might be better, but they refused stoically to tell me the jumper settings for their drive. On the other hand, WD tried to be very helpful. I quickly got to a person that was very familiar with the 1007 controller by punching thought the 1-800 voicemail system. The woman who answered stepped through the setup procedure with me on the phone, and agreed that I had everything set as correctly as could be, but alas, the Siemens drive still refused to cooperate. I put the Siemens back on the shelf and yanked a Priam drive out of my IBM model-80. I flipped the switch on the Praim to 36 sectors to track, and it formatted perfectly with the 1007 controller in about 20 minutes. The Siemens drive had the symptom that one of the other net practicioners described of seeming to work properly, but taking an excruciatingly long time to format. I believe this was the result of being in soft sector mode such that the drive does not pass back the expected address mark to the controller. ==Bill== -- Bill Mayhew Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine Rootstown, OH 44272-9995 USA 216-325-2511 wtm@uhura.neoucom.edu ....!uunet!aablue!neoucom!wtm