barbieri@synopsys.com (Nicholas Barbieri) (03/26/91)
Does anyone have any experience with the Spirit Technology hard disk subsystem which uses st506 drives for the A500? Just exactly what type of drives will this controller work with? Does anyone have some benchmarks? How does its speed compare with typical SCSI controllers? Any info, experiences, or anecdotes about it would be appreciated. Nick Barbieri barbieri@synopsys.com
drysdale@cbmvax.commodore.com (Scott Drysdale) (03/26/91)
In article <706@synopsys.COM> barbieri@synopsys.com (Nicholas Barbieri) writes: >Does anyone have any experience with the Spirit Technology hard disk >subsystem which uses st506 drives for the A500? Just exactly what type of >drives will this controller work with? Does anyone have some benchmarks? >How does its speed compare with typical SCSI controllers? Any info, >experiences, or anecdotes about it would be appreciated. i've got an HDA506. it works pretty well. mine has the autoboot kit and an omti RLL controller. on a 7.2mhz 68000, using ffs, i can get around 350K/second reads. with a 68010 in the same machine, around 420K/second reads (had to change the interleave for the 68010). the big beef i have with it is that it doesn't deal with bad blocks very well at all. their format program does a quick scan for defects (doesn't let you enter defects off the drive label!), and that's it. if any errors occur during use, you've got to pray that the error is in a data block and that the file containing it is not very important. you must figure out what file/directory has the bad block, delete the file/directory, and then run their MapBad program which *might* find the bad block. and when it does (get *this!*) it simply marks the block as allocated in the dos bitmap. (the block is *not* "mapped out" in the usual sense. if you do a diskverify, you'll hit it. the driver should be aware of the bad blocks and make them invisible to the system, and provide alternate blocks) what happens next time your drive gets validated? bingo! the bad block is back in action. ugh. i started working on a new format program and other utilities for fixing bad blocks (the hard drives i use came out of pc's after they had "failed" - ie, track 0 went bad). about 2 weeks into the project, the controller died. got it fixed a few months ago, but have been a little on the busy side (besides having a nice 2500 to use at home now!). one of these years... by the way, when it stopped working, they fixed it very quickly (once i sent it in). it took about 2 weeks. i would have sent it back much sooner if i had remembered that it had a 1 year warranty and would cost me just shipping to get fixed. >Nick Barbieri >barbieri@synopsys.com --Scotty -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Scott Drysdale Software Engineer Commodore Amiga Inc. UUCP {allegra|burdvax|rutgers|ihnp4}!cbmvax!drysdale PHONE - yes. "Have you hugged your hog today?" =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=