🚀 go-pugleaf

From: stag!thelake!steve@bungia.mn.org (Steve Yelvington)



 Xorg@cup.portal.com (Peter Ted Szymonik) writes...

>    How fast are the trasnfer rates, again, this depends entirely on
> the drive mech and which host adaptor you use.  As a benchmark, my
> Supra 30meg drive transfered 350Kps at 60-65ms, the 100meg ICD drive I
> just put together flies at 550Kps and 35-40ms, it all depends on the
> drive mech supplied with your drive (or the one you buy.)
>  

I hacked together a Wren I (nominally 36 megabytes), one of the bargain
Adaptec boards from Timeline and a Supra host adaptor. The ICD RATEHD
program says I'm running a respectable 377kb/sec data transfer rate, but a
shameful 527ms average seek rate. This is an old drive, but that seems
more than a bit much. I have the drive mounted vertically -- is there a
possibility that could affect the stepper's positioning of the heads?
I'm running a 1:1 interleave -- could that be involved?

>    Is there caching?  Yes, there are lots of PD and commercial
> cacheing programs, but I haven't found them to be at all necessary
> given the ST's blazing HD data transfer rates.  Probably the only
> thing left to speed drive access with be the new TOS 1.4 which will
> improve FAT handling.
>  

Because of the horribly slow seeks I'm getting, PATH searches can be
painful. For that reason, I've installed Atze Dijkstra's DCACHE program
with the argument cde=c18, creating a common cache for drives C, D and E
of 18K. That's enough to keep all the directories in RAM as well as some
smaller utilities, such as the file pager I use for UUCP stuff. It helps a
lot and it's worth the RAM even on my small system (512K).

DCACHE was published in this newsgroup about nine months ago.



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