Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-pcd!hpcvra!howard
From: howard@hpcvra.CV.HP.COM (Howard Honig)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Hard drive/Controller
Message-ID: <5050007@hpcvra.CV.HP.COM>
Date: 15 Jun 89 00:16:32 GMT
References: <14348@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Co., Corvallis, OR, USA
Lines: 18

Good to hear you solved your problem.  I had a similar experience and
solved it by a kind hearted local computer salesmen who gave me a copy
of Disk Manager.

One more thing you may want to try if I can get my $0.02 in,  
since you have reformated the disk using a low level formatter, you
may have used the default settings for the interleave factor.  Try
getting your hands on a copy of Spinwrite.  It will analyze your disk
for defects, and let you know what the optimum interleave factor is.
Usually, 20Meg drive will default to a 3, when a faster AT machine can
have better throughput at a 2:1 or even a 1:1 interleave factor increasing
data transfer time by 80% or more.  

Spinwrite is unique in that it will allow you to change the interleave
factor without losing what data is on the disk (Caveat: back it up
anyway).

Howard Honig