ESDI controller recommendations

[Conor P. Cahill]

In article <1474 at wb3ffv.ampr.org>, howardl at wb3ffv.ampr.org ( WB3FFV) writes:
> From article <121 at mdi386.UUCP>, by bruce at mdi386.UUCP (Bruce A. McIntyre):
> > 
> > The Caching disk controllers from Distributed Processing Technology would
> > be an excellent choice for your application.  With one of these, the
> > average access time of your drives would approach .5 ms (not 5, but .5)
> > and with the cache being able to be set up to 4MB, it would turn that
> > 300Mb drive into a real screamer.

You can add up to 12 meg to the DPT controller (totaly separate from the 
standard memory).  But you loose one of the slots for one of the daughter
cards (the first one).  I wasn't too happy about this since I have all
eight slotts filled and would like to have a little breathing room.

> > 
> > They also offer an add on board for disk mirroring, and can support
> > any variation of ESDI, SCSI or MFM drive.  Since the definition of the
> > drive to the PC can be redefined from the actual physical drive config,
> > with the controller doing the translation, you can use virtually any drive.
> > 

Note that the disk will appear as an ST506 to the rest of the system which 
makes integrations real easy.

> > The controller also does the error correction and bad tracking...
> 
> 
>  Hello All,
> 
> I just purchased one of the DPT controllers for use on a 15mbps ESDI drive
> here in the office.  I would be very interested to see if anybody else on
> the net has been using the DPT contorller, and under what configuration.

I have a DPT controller with 2.5 meg of cache memory and a 650meg (formatted)
ESDI drive.

> Prior to using the DPT product I had the Adaptec 2322B ESDI controller,
> but needed a 15mbps (not 10) for the new 780 megabyte harddisk.  I decided
> to give an intelegent harddisk controller a shot, and so far it appers to 
> be working very well.  At present I am using the basic configuration of
> 512K of cache/buffer on the controller, but would like to hear of others
> experiences with the board.  I would also be interested to see if anybody
> increased the onboard RAM, and how much improvement did the increased RAM
> give you.  I believe the price for the controller is fair, but the cost to
> add RAM adds up real quick.  So as the story goes, I wouldn't buy the 
> additional RAM unless the cost was justified...

I never ran the system without the 2 meg daughter card, so I cant tell you 
what the difference would be.  

I am very pleased with the disk system (I really appreciate the fact that
uncompresses of 100/200k files immediately return the prompt (The first few
times I thought something was wrong, but I easily got used to it)).




















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