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From: steve@wintermute.ucsd.edu ({Darkavich})
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Some of Seagate's ST251-1's running at 40ms
Message-ID: <13489@ucsd.Edu>
Date: 7 May 90 15:46:09 GMT
References: <1806@nems.dt.navy.mil>
Sender: news@ucsd.Edu
Reply-To: steve@wintermute.ucsd.edu ({Darkavich})
Organization: University of California, San Diego
Lines: 44

In article <1806@nems.dt.navy.mil> scherer@dtrc.dt.navy.mil (Doug Scherer) writes:
>
>     I have experienced a problem now over the last 6 months that I found 
>     very interesting and wondered if anyone else has had.
>
>     I've purchase about 20 Seagate ST251-1 drives and found that they all
>     worked well but when I ran benchmarks on 3 of them they were really
>     ST251 (40ms) drives.  The cases were marked as -1's though.  
>
>	What's going on with Seagate!  It's one way for them to get rid of
>ST251's left over.

Well, there are two thing that you need to make sure that you have done.
The first is to make sure you have a 1:1 interleave controller card in your
computer.  If you do then you need to make sure that the hard drive was
low-level formated with an interleave of 1:1.  If the former is not true
then you need to buy a new controller card and re-low-level format the
drive.  (Make back-ups!!!!!).  If the latter is true then all you need to
do is use a program like Optune from Gazzelle software and it will
re-format the drive with a inter-leave of 1:1 or tell you what the best
interleave should be.  (Eventhough it does it with out corrupting the data
on the drive it is still a good idea to make back-ups)

Know a question for those people out there that can help.

BTW.  I have a seagate 251 and a 1:1 interleave controller and the drive is
partitioned 2 meg, 20 meg, and 20 meg.  I formated it with a 3:1 interleave
like seagate says.  After running optune on it it still tells me 1:1 is
best.  I re-formated the C drive and it knows runs at (17ms) according to 
QAplus.  I do not have benchmark so I cann't tell it that is the true ms
time.  Norton's (si) tells me 3.7 so it is right around 28ms or less.  I
keep forgetting my conversions.  Anyway my question is using Optune, I try
to re-tune the D and E drive but it tells me that I must turn off disk
caching first!  I have no disk cache, neither in memory or in set-up.
I have an AT-12mhz with AMI BIOS.  I have removed everything from memory
except my disk manager software.  The only thing I can think of is that I
have a 0 wait state machine and maybe it uses cache to achive this and the
software is seeing this assuming it is disk cache.  Does anyone else know
what may be wrong or experienced this problem??

Thanks, 
	All help is greatly appreciated.
	Steve Misrack
	steve@ucsd.edu