🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <e42ea82e443226a16398@canremote.uucp> lon.leader@canremote.uucp (LON LEADER) writes:
>
>   Can anyone tell me how to 'set' or 'force' a specific 
>interleave when low-level formatting a harddisk on the 3000?
...
>   I then used the 3000 to do a low-level format and the drive
>now tested out at 253,000.  I figured from this that the
>interleave had been set lower than the three it was before,
>but I had no way of knowing what it was.
...
>   Mad impetuous fool that I am, I then moved the drive back
>to the 1000, and low-leveled it with an interleave of one.
>Back on the 3000 for partitioning and testing, I got (are you
>ready for this?) 436,000 !!!!  It isn't as fast as the Quantum
>inside (612,000) but I like it.  It has worked without any
>problems for several days.

	When HDToolBox (or the production prep program) formats a SCSI drive,
they request interleave 0, which is SCSI shorthand for asking the controller
to select it's favorite interleave (since the drive in most cases knows more
about the best interleave than HDToolBox does).  It sounds like the Adaptec
thing is selecting 2, when it can run faster at 1.  Perhaps Adaptec thought
that the hosts it would talk to would be too slow to deal with 436K/s (and
on a PC clone, they might be).

	All modern drives I've tried have selected interleave 1.

	Ability to set interleave was considered, but was deemed a bit too
confusing for most users, especially since almost all drives select the
"right" numbers.  Perhaps this can be worked into some advanced options stuff
for a future release.

-- 
Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering.
{uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com  BIX: rjesup  
Common phrase heard at Amiga Devcon '89: "It's in there!"