fangchin@elaine41.stanford.edu (Chin Fang) (12/10/90)
In an earlier posting of mine, I repeatedly misspelled Connor as
Cornor. I hope this short message will clear up any confusion that
the misspelled name may cause.
I think even Interactive 386/ix can use IDE as well. After all, IDE
is basically a "transparent" extension of the ISA bus, so I dare even
to guess most 386 unices can use this drive interface too. I
personally know some micro manufacturers in San Jose area using IDE
drives and running Interactive 386/ix in their development labs.
One additional info I forgot to mention: Connor drives offer 15 Mhz
data transfer rate. In DOS environment, I used the latest Coretest
from Core International to test that claim. It came very close
indeed. (the drive comes with 64k data buffer, which I could not turn
off, but these days who doesn't? Lots non-caching controllers like WD1007
comes with 32k - 64k or so so called look ahead buffer anyway)
15 Mhz is fairly good, consider just two years back 10 Mhz was the
state of the art. Now SCSI II and new ESDI drives all come in 15 Mhz
range. Some pricy ones even offer 20 Mhz or even 25 Mhz, encroching
the SMD interface range not long ago reserved only for workstations
and/or minis. You can buy controllers for such really fast drives,
but the $$$ involved would be hard to swallow.
Two years back, when I tested my Miniscribe 3130, coretest
consistently showed a 780Kb/s data transfer rate, much lower than
the claimed 10Mhz in the spec. sheet.
The above results should not be taken as a serious hardware
performance measure however. I think most readers of this group know
that such results just a biased view of certain respects of the hardware
being tested, they are NOT the whole picture, for reference only.
Chin Fang
Mechanical Engineering Department
Stanford University
fangchin@portia.stanford.edu
fang@rocket.cadcam.rok.com
{there is no pc anymore. If sparc1 1+ is slower than an EISA 33 Mhz
486, why call the later pc, the former workstations, a more prestigious
catagory? henceforth I will call Sun's sparcs pc too. Laugh.....}dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi) (12/11/90)
>After all, IDE >is basically a "transparent" extension of the ISA bus... IDE means "integrated drive electronics". It simply means that the controller is on the drive. IDE does not imply anything about the actual electrical interface. If an IDE drive is designed to be connected to an ISA bus, then of course it is a transparent extension of the bus, and looks like a standard AT drive. If an IDE drive is custom-engineered for some manufacturer, then there is no guarantee as to what it looks like electrically. If an IDE drive has a SCSI interface, then it has a SCSI interface and not an AT interface. Etc. Interpret "IDE" as meaning "when you buy the drive, you automatically get the controller with it". -- Rahul Dhesi <dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com> UUCP: oliveb!cirrusl!dhesi
john@jwt.UUCP (John Temples) (12/11/90)
In article <1990Dec10.021335.5221@portia.Stanford.EDU> fangchin@elaine41.stanford.edu (Chin Fang) writes: >In an earlier posting of mine, I repeatedly misspelled Connor as >Cornor. It's "Conner," not "Connor." Not to be confused with "Conor," a frequent poster to this group whose name is usually mangled in followups... :) >I think even Interactive 386/ix can use IDE as well. I have used the 200 MB Conner IDE drive with ISC 2.0.2 without any problems. >One additional info I forgot to mention: Connor drives offer 15 Mhz >data transfer rate. In DOS environment, I used the latest Coretest >from Core International to test that claim. The last I remember reading about IDE stated that it used a 12 MHz transfer rate. Is Conner now using something faster? When I ran Coretest on the Conner drive, it showed a transfer rate of about 1100 KB/sec, which sounds low for a 15 MHz drive considering I usually get around 500 KB/sec on a 5 MHz drive. Not that it necessarily means anything, but I noticed a 24 MHz crystal on the IDE host adapter. -- John W. Temples -- john@jwt.UUCP (uunet!jwt!john)
dave@westmark.WESTMARK.COM (Dave Levenson) (12/16/90)
In article <1990Dec10.021335.5221@portia.Stanford.EDU>, fangchin@elaine41.stanford.edu (Chin Fang) writes: > I think even Interactive 386/ix can use IDE as well. After all, IDE > is basically a "transparent" extension of the ISA bus, so I dare even > to guess most 386 unices can use this drive interface too. I have tried AT&T SysV/386r3.2.2 with IDE disk drives. It appears to work correctly. This probably means that Interactive Systems UNIX will also work with this hardware, as I think AT&T bought their port from Interactive. -- Dave Levenson Internet: dave@westmark.com Westmark, Inc. UUCP: {uunet | rutgers | att}!westmark!dave Warren, NJ, USA AT&T Mail: !westmark!dave [The Man in the Mooney] Voice: 908 647 0900 Fax: 908 647 6857