[comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware] <564@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>

neese@adaptx1.UUCP (03/31/91)

>/* ---------- "SCSI slowness" ---------- */
>
>I have a Quantum ProDrive 170S and an Adaptec 1522 controller (SCSI-2).
>Supposedly, I should be getting upwards of 2 MB/sec out of this
>combination, but when I use coretest (v 2.91), it tells me I am getting a
>mere 900 k/sec.  The ProDrive has a 64k cache built in on board.  Some
>system details:
>	Mylex MXA-33, 386 33 mhz motherboard
>	8 mb ram
>	Adaptec 1522 SCSI-2 contoller
>	Quantum ProDrive 170S
>	DOS 4.01
>
>I called adaptec but they weren't helpful.  They said call your dealer,
>since their dealers are supposedly knowledgeable about the card.  Of course
>this didn't work.  I checked out all the manuals, and I think that I have
>the zillion and one jumpers set correctly, but I am still sluggish.  Any
>clues???  Any ways I can check on the cache being implemented (it goes on
>and off and changes sizes depending on the mode that the drive is running
>in).

The Quantum cache parameters are set in a pretty much generic manner.  Not
really tailored for any particular environment.  If you reprogrammed the
parameters to set the number of segments to 1 and the cache size for that
segment to 128, you would get around 3MB/sec under coretest.  You can verify
the size Quantum has the cache set for by forciing coretest to use smaller
block sizes.  Around 16K or so you will see a performance increase.  Probably
around 2MB/sec or so.
Of course, in the real world you probably won't get much of a performance
gain, under DOS, unless you are really using a disk intensive program, but
if you want coretest to show impressive numbers, you will need to reprogram
the Quantum cache.

			Roy Neese
			Adaptec Senior SCSI Applications Engineer
			UUCP @  neese@adaptex
				uunet!cs.utexas.edu!utacfd!merch!adaptex!neese