Help with ESIX ESDI No-translation Mode

[Bill Vermillion]

In article <2733 at sixhub.UUCP> davidsen at sixhub.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>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.

Now that I go back and look at my notes, I must not have been running in
translation mode, but running in normal mode. (Sorry for that, my mind has
been wandering off and leaving me behind :-) .

But what is the problem in non-translation mode that space is being thrown
away (according to Tom Neff he can't use more thatn 512 megs).

Here is a df -v on my drive as it is running while typing in this message. 

Mount Dir  Filesystem         blocks      used      free  %used
/          /dev/dsk/0s1       167070     45658    121412   27%
/usr       /dev/dsk/0s3       409500    281184    128316   68%
/usr2      /dev/dsk/0s4       571970    197162    374808   34%
                              _______
		Total Block 1148540 * 512 bytes/ block = 588 megs.  Add in
		my 20 meg swap space, and 30 meg dos partition, and I come
		up with 638 megs.  This is also a refurbed drive and I had
		about 350 bad tracks, and I used alternate sector
		translation, so I threw away one sector per track per head
		so that got rid of some more.   

The drive is a Maxtor 8760E, ostensibly 660 megs, running a WD1007V-SE2 (I
think that's the correct number, the one with the floppy controller on it).

Jumpers 11/12 are set for alternate sector mapping.  That throws away about
12 Megs of drive space, but its sure give me much more than the 512 Meg Tom
said he was limited to.  (The Subject line asked for help in ESDI
non-tranlation mode under ESIX).  Tom emailed me on this last August when I
brought the system up, and I didn't know there were problems.

OS is Esix Sys V.3.2.   AMI bios, C&T chipset. 25Mhz '386.

>  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.

I see it now on translation.
But what is there to benchmark.  I'm more confused than ever.   The system
is running a full news feed, and /usr2 is where news lives.  (The great
amount of space on that is because the main feed has been sick the last
couple of days.  I got 23 news articles on Sunday, and 730 on Monday.
Saturday was full, and Friday was light.  That partition normally runs about
65% full.
 
>  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.

The only problem I had was the jumpers on the drive were not right, and
Maxtor gave us the proper jumper settings, but did not tell us what the
jumpers did.  (In the heat of getting things going I forgot to write down
the settings before I installed the drive, and they can't be seen unless
the drive comes out, and that is a pain in this cabinet).

>  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.

Thanks for the warning on that one.


-- 
Bill Vermillion - UUCP: uunet!tarpit!bilver!bill
                      : bill at bilver.UUCP