Help with ESIX ESDI No-translation Mode

[Wm E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <1990Dec21.055405.1053 at bilver.uucp> bill at bilver.uucp (Bill Vermillion) writes:

| I have been running in translation mode from day one.   The reason it was
| put there is so that you can run bigger drives and not give anything up.
| Why do you feel you have to run it WITHOUT translation.

| Am I missing something here?   Why not use the translation?

  The WD will not run a large drive in translation mode. Even with
translation set to, say, 64spt, you get 1024*64*16, or 524288k, (512MB).
Some of us lucky people are running drive larger than that. You also
lose performance (at least by my measurements) by using translation.

  It's not obvious unless you are running a large fast disk (and take
the time to benchmark) that this is the case, so I can appreciate the
question, hope the answer is clear.

  For the original poster, I don't remember doing anything fancy, I just
turned off the translation mode, formatted the drive, and when unix
asked me if the parameters were correct I told it no and put in the real
values. This seems to work for all SCO, ESIX D, and Dell or Intel V.4.
We were unable to make it run with Dell or ISC 3.2, although both of
them assurred us that we could just ignore the error messages about BIOS
limitations, phase of the moon, etc.

  My experience: after two weeks of work by people who have been doing
UNIX since V7, we could not make badtrack check anything past 1023, and
dropped ISC/Dell from evaluation.

  Disclamer: this was September, things may be diferent, it may work
fine and just the documentation and tech support is broken, but as far
as I'm concerned it's broken and ISC had no fix at that time. Dell V.4
has worked perfectly in every respect with RLL, ESDI, and SCSI drives on
all machines, under all conditions.
-- 
bill davidsen - davidsen at sixhub.uucp (uunet!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen)
    sysop *IX BBS and Public Access UNIX
    moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc and 80386 mailing list
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me