Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ucsd!ames!pacbell!att!chinet!mcdchg!ddsw1!ddsw1!point!wek
From: wek@point.UUCP (Bill Kuykendall)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Dell 310 flame (of sorts)
Message-ID: <[2406.5]comp.ibmpc;1@point.UUCP>
Date: 13 Oct 89 11:00:06 GMT
References: <8634@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <8779@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Lines: 35

>company, so I tried that in my DELL. Well it seemed quite compatable,
>great setup in the ROM of the controller, but the DELL just could not
>handle 1:1 interleave with this sucker. I got 54K (thats right)/sec. I
>set it to 1:2 interleave and got 495K/sec (gosh its fun doing low level
>formats of 300+meg hard disks repeatedly :-) ).  I took this hard disk
>and controller over to my friend's 20Mhz Mylex 386 and did the 1:1
>interleave and saw 990K/sec without buffers!!     Well I called up Dell

I have 30 or 40 Dell 310s and a *bunch* of older PC's LTD 286 machines.  The
oldest stuff from PC's LTD was a little flakey, but I have no complaints
about their pcs built in the last 2 years or so.  They are fast and reliable.

The key to the discussion above is probably the Mylex board's bus speed, not
the Dell's.  Many clone makers run the bus at the clock speed of the CPU. 
Dell limits the bus speed to 8mz, to ensure compatibility with add-in cards.

The chances are pretty good that if you have a high end DTP monitor and
video card, and perhaps a LaserMaster card or flatbed scanner attached to
your system, that one or all of them will choke on the bus speed of the
cheap clone.  Or worse still, they might seem to work just fine except on
alternate Thursday evenings when you're working late to meet a deadline.

It isn't fair to judge a machine on it's performance with one high
performance peripheral.  Drive controllers are designed to handle faster
buses so that they can be used in unix boxes that really *are* io intensive
and probably don't have a lot of other exotic peripherals.  

Before you send the Dell back, I'd suggest plugging your entire
configuration into the Mylex clone and see if it all works.  If that's OK,
then ask yourself if you're ever going to add anything new to the system. 
If your answer is no, then go for the gusto, and build your own.

----
Bill K.
wek@point.UUCP