Does ESIX still not support RLL?

[David Kessner]

In article <3087 at cirrusl.UUCP> Rahul Dhesi <dhesi at cirrus.COM> writes:
>I still don't see how ESIX (or any other operating system) can find out
>whether the the controller uses RLL.  I can see that an operating
>system might not support a certain number of sectors per track, but
>that has only a very nebulous relationship to the recording format
>used, other than that formats denser than MFM yield more sectors per
>track.

You might no be able to see if the drive is RLL, but it is obviously 
possible.  Not only does my ESIX figure the thing out, but so do many
other MS-DOS programs like Speed-Stor, Nortons, and several other things.


>Perhaps Usenet posters ought to be saying "ESIX requires no more than
>17 sectors per track" (if that is true, which it probably is not,
>because the disk off which I run ESIX has more than 17 sectors per
>track) instead of blaming it on the recording format.
>
>Better, still, say something like "ESIX doesn't support my disk
>controller, and it happens to use RLL recording, but the recording
>format many or many not have something to do with it."

When I talked to ESIX tech support when I bought ESIX, they said something
on the order of this, "It's not that we don't support RLL.  But rather that
we have only tested it with the Western Digital 1006-SR2 RLL controller and
we don't guarentee that anything else will work.  We've heard that the
Adaptec controller works but we have not tried it ourselves."

The Perstor controller is strange (even by RLL terms).  I have tried to
steer clear of them since I have heard that they have compatability problems
even under anything but plain MS-DOS.


I don't usderstand all this talk about ESIX not supporting RLL.  It does.
Works great.

-- 
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