mlord@bwdls58.UUCP (Mark Lord) (08/28/90)
About a week ago, I posted a preliminary review of the PS180-16FN controller from Perstor. I have successfully used this controller to boost the capacity of a 40Meg Miniscribe 3650 to over 76 Meg (formatted), and a Seagate 251-1 to about 77 Meg (formatted). The miniscribe has zero bad sectors, and the Seagate has only the same bad tracks as were determined at the factory. Unfortunately, DOS insists on trying to "recover" the bad tracks for use. This is a no-no. The Norton DT command can be used to mark individual clusters as bad, but I have nothing for marking whole tracks. In the meanwhile, I have acquired a 71Meg Priam drive to replace the Seagate, giving me a much needed storage boost. The Priam is NOT supported (officially) by Perstor controllers, but seems to work just fine in most repects. It formatted with 2:1 interleave, yielding about 113.4 Meg under DOS 4.01. This is using only the first 1024 cylinders of the drive (it has 1165 in total). Suggestions on getting at the other 20Meg of space will be welcomed. The only hitch with this drive, is that I cannot boot from it with the Perstor controller. I guess this is where the "unsupported" phrase takes meaning. No problem, I boot from the Miniscribe instead. So.. my 40Meg Miniscribe is now a 76Meg drive, at 3:1 interleave. and my 71Meg Priam is now a 113 Meg drive, at 2:1 interleave. Not bad, considering the Priam could only hold 60Meg in the first 1024 cylinders with my old controller. -- ___Mark S. Lord__________________________________________ | ..uunet!bnrgate!bmerh724!mlord | Climb Free Or Die (NH) | | Ottawa, Ontario. 613-763-7482 | Personal views only. | |________________________________|________________________|
davef@videovax.tv.tek.com (David Fibush) (08/31/90)
I think perstore is great too. I have used it to format a Segate 4096 to 143 MB. The only thing I am unhappy about is the SpinRite doesn't work correctly. It recognizes the drive and everything is ok until it finds a bad sector. Then it tries "forever" to analyze it. Gibson says "don't worry it will stop eventually" but I don't like my hard drive restoring to track 0 continuously for many minutes. Anyone else have this problem or a solution?