Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!sdd.hp.com!samsung!ernie.viewlogic.com!hari!peter
From: peter@hari.Viewlogic.COM (Peter Colby)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Serial safety; HD inteleave
Message-ID: <1990Oct8.170716@hari.Viewlogic.COM>
Date: 8 Oct 90 21:07:16 GMT
References: <1990Sep20.123824@miguel.llnl.gov> <1990Sep25.042714.25505@ccu.umanitoba.ca> <1990Sep30.060736.28468@dhw68k.cts.com> <1990Oct4.192735.8812@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
Sender: news@viewlogic.com (News Administrator)
Reply-To: peter@hari.Viewlogic.COM (Peter Colby)
Organization: Viewlogic Systems, Inc., Marlboro, MA
Lines: 40

In article <1990Oct4.192735.8812@ccu.umanitoba.ca>,
umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Charles Carlson) writes:
|> >While I suppose you *could* change the interleave factor, the amount
of
|> >data shuffling you'd have to do to make it work properly really
wouldn't
|> >be worth the hassle.
|> 
|> Of course its possible to do!  There are countless programs available
for the
|> PC to do it!  
|> What data shuffling are you talking about?  All you simply have to do
is:
|> 1) read the track into memory
|> 2) reformat track to desired interleave
|> 3) write data back to disk.

	Sigh! The PC ain`t SCSI. The PC runs generally standard ST506 interface
drives
which I suppose allow you to format on a track by track basis. SCSI
hides all the low
level access to the disk in the SCSI controller tied to the disk. For
every SCSI drive
(or SCSI controlled ST506 drive) I have ever seen or heard of,
formatting is an all or
nothing process. In fact, most of the (no longer very) new embeded SCSI
drives don't even
allow you to cheange the interleave at all. They do all sorts of fancy
stuff like force
1:1 interleave or special zone recording or whatever and hide it all in
the board stuck
to the drive. You don't even need to know your drive's geometry any
more!!
	Peter C


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