heintze@fmcsse.enet.dec.com (Siegfried Heintze) (10/10/90)
I ran out of room with my 28 ms Seagate ST251 MFM 40 mb drive so I purchased a used RLL 80 mb RLL 28 ms Micropolis from Terry - a fellow who has a repair shop in is home. I'm running a 10Mhz AT. I have a make file that that currently requires about 20 minutes to execute when all the OBJ files are deleted. I am certain my seagate did not take this long. In fact, I believe my seagate used to require about 5 minutes to execute this make file when starting from scratch. I'll verify this in a couple of days: as soon as I have time to swap the drives. I called up Terry. He was a little defensive and demanded I have some hard numbers before I complain. Well having worked on peformance problems for customer support, I can identify with this attitude. He did say he forgot to run SETUP and change the drive type. He recommended I run SETUP and change the drive type to 1. It was set to 40 and I changed this to 1. This seemed to help a little. I timed the execution of the make file after switching the drive type (in SETUP) to 1. Where can I find some documentation on this SETUP program - I am suspicious because I have no idea what these numbers mean. I occiasonally use WINDOWS V3.0 so I have their smartcache in my autoexec.bat. Could this be causing a problem? (The make file was never run from windows). How could this be that there is such a drastic desparity in performance between two 28 ms drives? Terry told me, if anything, the Micropolis should be faster since seagate often fudges their performance claims. This might be a controller problem. I'm not sure I understand the concept of interleaving as it applies to controllers. An explanation would be welcome. Terry said this was not likely to be a problem with interleaving although I believe I do not have an interleaved controller. How can I find out? Thanks, Sieg
mlord@bwdls58.bnr.ca (Mark Lord) (10/11/90)
In article <15946@shlump.nac.dec.com> heintze@fmcsse.enet.dec.com (Siegfried Heintze) writes: ...woes of a new drive being slower than the old... >This might be a controller problem. I'm not sure I understand the concept of >interleaving >as it applies to controllers. An explanation would be welcome. Terry said this >was not likely to be a problem with interleaving although I believe I do not Sure does sound like interleave. Grab the following program from Simtel20 and try it out on your system: PD1:<MSDOS.DSKUTL> IAU19D.ARC B 87549 890818 Nondestructive hard disk interleave adjuster Or use the equivalent functions of SPEDSTOR, SPINRITE, or NORTON-5.0. -- ___Mark S. Lord__________________________________________ | ..uunet!bnrgate!mlord%bmerh724 | Climb Free Or Die (NH) | | MLORD@BNR.CA Ottawa, Ontario | Personal views only. | |________________________________|________________________|