PerStor Controllers

[HIM]

I DO NOT intend this as a flame, but I would like to correct some points
before harm is done to a fine product:

(BTW , they don't pay me a dime)

>  Resp: 2 of 2 by *Masked* at ics.uci.edu
>Author: [Ira Baxter]
>  Date: Sun Dec 24 1989 17:29 EST
> Lines: 84

Writes:

>this is what I remember.  A special set of installation programs are
>required to set up the Perstor.  I found these programs to be rather
>inferior in maturity, but they did work; typical problems were menus
>that offered (at different times!) choice of obviously garbage disk
>configurations,

There is a reason for this. The perstore controller needs to re-assign to
device list in the CMOS drive table.  This means that when you run the
perstore drive configuration program, it will read the type from the CMOS
(wich was put there by you NORMAl cmos program) and interpret that against
ITS drive table, and get a bad config.  This goes away after the CMOS has
been done with the Perstore software.  

Example: My 4096 is a type 4 on the perstore list , but a dos program like
Disk Manager will get REAL confused when it looks up type 4 in the ROM table!

>manufacturer-supplied bad block list, so they have to be re-discovered
>(if re-discoverable) by the ISC surface-analysis process.  Since the

Actually , you can add the manufacturer list , I didnt , as with the new
format radically changing the sector layout , that information was moot
anyway. What I did was spen timeon the phone to a guy at Seagate, he
interpreted the bad track info with me into what sector was REALLY bad (that
caused the track to be flagged) and then I mapped THAT into the new drive
layout and locked out THOSE sectores.

>(if re-discoverable) by the ISC surface-analysis process.  Since the
>controller isn't very fast, the additional drive capacity provided by
>the Perstor actually makes this more of a nuisance rather than less.

Geeee... too much drive space a PROBLEM ??? (grin) ... face facts , for most
reads this doesn't matter MUCH (I hope ;-) that I have noticed, and what HAS
helped is the fact that the amount of HEAD track to track movement is way
down. (On sequential reads on a contiguous file , there are 31 sectores per
head step instead of 17) 

>chip vendor, but I think the real problem is that the entire design is
>marginal (pushing the drive right to the edge of what it can do), and

Hmmm.. wouldn't know , But havent had ONE problem in MONTHS.

>their software support didn't give me a very good feeling about their
>quality control.

Too bad. Everyone I talked to was GREAT.

In fact , they are VERY glad to see UNIX folks start to take an interest,
they will BEND OVER backwards to gain acceptance with the UNIX crowd on
386's so mention that when you call ! (grin)

>The up side: the controller does work, and with a Maxtor 2190 (MFM
>rated for 150Mb) one gets an awesome 290+Mb of real capacity.  Both
>1.0.6, 2.0.2, and DOS 3.10 (with a 32Mb partition) seemed to work fine
>for the day or two that I ran them.
 
Not bad huh?

>chips by the factory tech, I would guess they simply run a higher bit
>rate at the drive, and count on their 56-bit ECC to save them.  That
>doesn't leave one with a warm feeling about the reliability of the
>inner tracks.

I dont >think< this is it , I was led to beleive they were playing with the
intersector gap on the track.  Oh well, it works!

>All of my remarks are, I think, OS independent.

Correct.

>I finally chose to use a WD1006SRV2, which is RLL compatible, on my
>Maxtor.  It doesn't double your capacity, but it does raise it
>signifcantly, and with the track buffering, one gets around 500Kb/sec

What capacity do you get ?? And is that drive RLL rated ??? I would think
that the trick of running RLL on a non RLL drive is at least as risky ??



****************************************************************************
"Perfume and leather baby , you and me together baby,
  what good is living in paradise, if you don't let yourself once or twice."
 -Tiffany  
 
 Kenneth J. Jamieson ---- THE BOSS at Xanadu Enterprises Inc.
      UUCP: tron1 at tronsbox.UUCP  BEST PATH ---> uunet!tronsbox!tron1 
      Sysop, Romantic Encounters BBS - (201)759-8450 / (201)759-8568 
****************************************************************************