Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!linus!philabs!micomvax!ray
From: ray@micomvax.UUCP (Ray Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Question about hard disk interleave factors
Message-ID: <998@micomvax.UUCP>
Date: 26 Apr 88 19:44:26 GMT
References: <2832@dalcs.UUCP> <188@vader.UUCP>
Reply-To: ray@micomvax.UUCP (Ray Dunn)
Organization: Philips Electronics Ltd. (TDS - Montreal) St. Laurent QC, Canada
Lines: 20
Keywords: fixed disk interleave

In article <188@vader.UUCP> bcs212@vader.UUCP (Vince Skahan) writes:
>I have a Tandy 20MB hard card that came with a recommended
>interleave factor of 3.  The guy at the Radio Shack Computer
>Center said they'd done extensive local testing and recomended
>using 2.
>
>I tested it myself and found "4" was the answer (giving a 450%
>increase in speed over both of the Tandy-recommended settings).....

4 may have been the answer, but what was the question??

Unfortunately, the "best" interleave factor is dependant on the application,
and if 4 happens to be the best for say a copy, which is reading a track or
cylinder of info in on one dos call, this does not mean it will be optimum
when running a disk intensive application program.

Not that it has anything to do with PC's, but in an ideal system, the
interleave factor should be a specifiable attribute at file write time, in
a hardware self-adjusting form, say millisecs per some cpu performance unit,
and thus be application tailored.