wlsmith@valve.heart.rri.uwo.ca (Wayne Smith) (05/29/91)
Ok. This is sort of a summary of things I found out about the ST 1144A 125 MB IDE drive I just got. The factory spec sheet says 1021 Cylinders, 7 heads, 512 bytes/sector, and 44/36/30 sectors per track. It seems that my 286's bios is directly talking to the drive, because there seems to be no extra bios involved with IDE drives. When playing with the BIOS drive type settings, the best capacity I could get out of the drive was 1025 cylinders, 35 sectors/track. This gave me 128,163,840 bytes total disk space, as reported by dos (4.01) format. Going to more cylinders gave a total disk space of a few hundred KB, and going to more sectors/track gave format unrecoverable allocation unit errors, although going to 36 sectors/track gave 130,445,312 good bytes and 866,304 bytes in bad sectors. Some specs (as reported by Spinrite II) are: track to track time of 1.76 ms full stroke time of 32.5 ms random seek of 15.88 ms rpm of 3622 ERLL format max tranfer rate of 1,075,200 bytes/sec In other words, it's fast and cheap (I paid $458 US from California Microchip). I did not get any software with the drive, or a seagate installation/info booklet (like you usually get with seagate drives). I got a small card with the ASKA-2839 controller card. It just tells you where the hard drive and floppy drive connectors are, and that the only jumper on the board is to enable/disable the floppy controller. I ran the drive through NDD.EXE and Spinrite's surface scan, and both reported no errors, so I assume the 128 MB disk space is valid. I was asked if the drive is auto-parking, and I think that all seagate drives over 40 MB (incuding the 251-1?) are auto-parking. The rom version for this drive is 5.0, the Ram version (?) is 5.d, and the factory test paper is dated april 23/91. Now for some scarry news... Hardware services here at the U told me that they had replaced about a dozen of these drives in the last 6 months or so, something about motor startup problems. They were installed in Packard-Bell 386(sx?)'s. Anyways, has anyone been able to squeeze more storage out of this drive, or had reliability probs, etc?
draper@cpsin3.cps.msu.edu (Patrick J Draper) (05/29/91)
>Some specs (as reported by Spinrite II) are: >track to track time of 1.76 ms >full stroke time of 32.5 ms >random seek of 15.88 ms >rpm of 3622 >ERLL format >max tranfer rate of 1,075,200 bytes/sec > >In other words, it's fast and cheap (I paid $458 US from California >Microchip). I did not get any software with the drive, or a seagate >installation/info booklet (like you usually get with seagate drives). >I got a small card with the ASKA-2839 controller card. It just tells >you where the hard drive and floppy drive connectors are, and that the >only jumper on the board is to enable/disable the floppy controller. > >I ran the drive through NDD.EXE and Spinrite's surface scan, and both reported >no errors, so I assume the 128 MB disk space is valid. > Is it safe to run Spinrite on an IDE drive? I thought this was a bad thing to do. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Patrick Draper disclaimer --- "I can't control my fingers, cps.msu.edu I can't control my toes." draper@cps.msu.edu --Ramones ------------------------------------------------------------------------