Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!madd
From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: big disks on PC AT clones
Message-ID: <22256@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 1 May 88 22:59:18 GMT
References: <21346@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Reply-To: madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Boston University Distributed Systems Group
Lines: 49

In article <21346@amdcad.AMD.COM> phil@amdcad.AMD.COM (Phil Ngai) writes:
|I am interested in the subject of how one can use big disks on PC AT
|clones. In particular there is the Seagate 4096, 80 megabyte, 28 ms,
|available for $699. How will my computer handle it? Does the setup
|command know about its drive type?

It may take some fiddling, but it will know about the drive type.
When I was installing one in our true-blue, the docs said "use the
type number on the disk" with a picture.  Of course it wasn't
purchased from IBM so there was no number.  VFeature had a table of
them, however, so we were in business.

|What do programs like Disk Manager,
|Golden Bow V/Feature, and Speed Stor do for me? Do I need a new BIOS
|ROM chip(s)? Can I have partitions bigger than 32 Mb? 

I've only used VFeature, but what it lets you do is:

	* password protect your hard drive (if you like)
	* concatenate multiple disks into one logical volume (or break
	  a large volume into smaller ones)
	* use disks larger than 32Mb (ours is 72Mb formatted)

It comes with low-level formatter and a partitioner.  The
documentation for both wasn't very good, but I got by so you CAN pull
the info out of it if you try.

We did not require new ROMS.

|Normally I would read the manual but you can't seem to do that without
|buying the product and it is amazing how expensive they are. Why
|should a disk driver cost $99 when DOS is less than that?

When you need the driver, you need it bad.  That's why we bought it.

|I tried talking to the salesman but afterwards, I felt almost as
|confused as I think he was. 

Well, if you have questions on VFeature, I'm a very satisfied user.
Never found a bug in 3 years of heavy use on truly bizarre hardware.

Be aware that many programs really don't like big volumes.  We were
unsuccessful in making Norton Utilities (whatever the version was
before the Enhanced Version) run, and SoftLogic's disk optimizer
barfed on the 2048-byte sectors.  Aside from that everything has
worked great.

jim frost
madd@bu-it.bu.edu