🚀 go-pugleaf

ph@pencom.com (Patrick Hester) writes:

>I'm looking for more disk space and may have narrowed my choice down
>to the Toshiba MK538FB. This is a 1.2g 12ms 3-1/2" 1/2 height drive.
>Is anyone using this drive? what do you think of it? Do you boot
>from it? Did you have to do anything special to get it working? How
>did you build the disk?

>Royce Howland sent me email about this drive. I tried to reply
>several times, but it bounced every time. So Royce thanks for your
>response and I'd like to ask you (or anyone else) the questions listed
>above. Please write or call.

>Thanks much!!

Well, I haven't gone anywhere.  :~)

Yes, I'm using the drive mentioned.  I think it's a great buy for the
money.  It Just Works, nothing special required.

I use the drive externally as a boot drive now, although at first I
didn't boot from it since I was slowly and carefully (after hearing all
the net-borne screams of anguish regarding upgrading to NS3.0) transfering
the contents of my running NS2.1 system (formerly on a Fujitsu 660MB drive)
onto the Toshiba and NS3.0.

I built the disk several different ways leading up to my final choice,
since I wanted to experiment with all the possible tools under NS3.0,
not having been the one to configure the original Fujitsu drive under
NS2.0.  My final choice involved customizing /etc/disktab to define 5
partitions and then using a nifty little NeXT script /usr/etc/builddisk
to build the disk.

The builddisk script relies, however, on several other scripts
(/etc/BLD.*) and corresponding custom fstab files (/etc/fstab.*) which
NeXT did not include with the NS3.0 release.  So I had to grab those
from NS2.x.  A little tweaking, and presto!  A script that can build
virtually any configuration of drive that your heart desires.

I'm unsure why NeXT seems not to officially support /usr/etc/builddisk,
since it looks very flexible and complete.  I'm also not sure why they
recommend against using multiple partitions on big drives.  The first
time a corrupted filesystem walks a pattern of destruction across 1.2GB
(or more) worth of OS, programs, data, etc., you'll be sorry you didn't
partition things, even if you've got backups out the wazoo.  IMHO, anyway.

One question I've got for anybody else using the Toshiba, though, is why
the pair of I/O benchmark programs I've got claim the drive can write
faster than it can read.  This doesn't make sense to me...
-- 
Royce Howland, DKW Systems Corp.   |  "And since OS/2 2.0 is a 32-bit
       Everything is IMHO          |   operating system, programs are easier
royce@splunge.uucp  (NeXTMail OK)  |   to write and run faster, too."
or kakwa!atlantis!splunge!royce    |  ad for OS/2 2.0