Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uwvax!shorty!thaler
From: thaler@shorty.CS.WISC.EDU (Maurice Thaler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Dell 310 flame (of sorts)
Summary: Resolution-- Put up with it ...
Message-ID: <8943@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 24 Oct 89 21:22:53 GMT
References: <8634@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <8779@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <[2406.5]comp.ibmpc;1@point.UUCP> <1141@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: thaler@shorty.cs.wisc.edu (Maurice Thaler)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 49


Well, after posting my mild "Dell Flame", I got a message from a Dell
employee who is on the net. He passed my message along to the powers
that be and I was invited to send in my motherboard for an upgrade!

I was told that some PAL chips (I think) were telling the BUS to slow
down so certain old fashioned hard disk controllers would not bog down
on the machine. 

Well, after getting the machine back, I inserted the WD 1007 WAH with a
Miniscribe 150Meg ESDI drive (16.5ms) and did a low level format. Ran
coretest and got 675K/sec.   Better but not outrageous.  Inserted the 
DTC (Qume) ESDI controller with the same drive, did a low level format
at 1:1 (just like the WD controller) and formated and ran coretest, this
time I get 54K/sec  which is what you can expect from a controller that
is feeding data faster than the bus can handle it. As I understand it,
the it is taking multiple passes to get the data through from one track.
Last time I went through the hassle of reformatting at 1:2 and got about
500K/sec, but what is the point after all, since I know I can get better
from the WD controller which is just plain slower and does not overrun 
the bus. 

I just bought a 33Mhz 386 w/ Award BIOS, board made by AMC. It has a
switchable BUS speed. I have found that with the DTC controller I get
990K/sec at either 8Mhz or 10Mhz bus speed. 

Now I don't know what the story is, but the fact is that my girlfriend
has a 386sx (16Mhz) clone with a DTC RLL card and a Japanese (perhaps
Mitzubishi or something) ST251 look alike (gets 65Meg) that does a 
1:1 interleave. She is getting  675/Sec from that setup. Is it
unreasonable of me to expect that with a very expensive ESDI drive on a
faster, more expensive Dell 310 20Mhz machine I should get better
performance?  

At any rate, I think that the Dell people were more than fair letting me
swap motherboards to try to improve performance. Too bad the Dell just
can't keep up.  Oh well. 

This is not a difinitive statement about Dell hardware. The fact is that
I am not savy enough about hardware to know just where the problem is,
but I do know that at this point, it appears that it would be a waste of
time and money to try and get a high ESDI performance via the use of
souped up cacheing controllers. I seriously doubt that the DPT
controller would work in the Dell. I do know that the DTC and Compuadd
controllers don't work.  If anybody discovers a work around, let me
know.

Maurice Thaler   SYSOP  Audio Projects BBS (608) 836-9473
                 SYSOP  Power Board    BBS (608) 222-8842