francois@welch.jhu.edu (Francois Schiettecatte) (06/15/91)
I have a question about interleave factor for hard disks. Given the speed of the Mac Plus when accessing the SCSI bus, what would be the optimal interleave factor I should use to format my hard drive. I have a standard Mac Plus with a 80 Mb quantum drive. I know enough about interleave factor to know that if it is less than optimal, performance can degrade a lot. On my PC I could use the formating program to test the hard drive and let the program choose the best interleave factor but I have looked at both Silverlinning and the Apple SC setup and neither offer that possibility, of testing the drive I mean, they can both set the interleave factor. Does anybody have any thoughts, what is Apple's suggestion on the matter? francois
ephraim@think.com (Ephraim Vishniac) (06/17/91)
In article <1991Jun15.134800.2012@welch.jhu.edu> francois@welch.jhu.edu (Francois Schiettecatte) writes: >I have a question about interleave factor for hard disks. >Given the speed of the Mac Plus when accessing the SCSI >bus, what would be the optimal interleave factor I should >use to format my hard drive. > >I have a standard Mac Plus with a 80 Mb quantum drive. >I know enough about interleave factor to know that if >it is less than optimal, performance can degrade a lot. >On my PC I could use the formating program to test the >hard drive and let the program choose the best interleave >factor but I have looked at both Silverlinning and the >Apple SC setup and neither offer that possibility, of >testing the drive I mean, they can both set the interleave >factor. The customary advice for the Mac Plus is to use 3:1 interleaving. This advice applies only to drives without caching, however. Since you've got a Quantum drive, you've probably got an on-board cache. Last I looked, such drives won't even let you tinker with the interleaving since you can only hurt performance that way. -- Ephraim Vishniac ephraim@think.com ThinkingCorp@applelink.apple.com Thinking Machines Corporation / 245 First Street / Cambridge, MA 02142 One of the flaws in the anarchic bopper society was the ease with which such crazed rumors could spread.