Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!uwvax!speedy!thaler
From: thaler@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Maurice Thaler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: FAST AT BUS & Hard Disk Combo Neede
Summary: Perplexed w/ not so hot combo
Message-ID: <6356@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 30 Sep 88 02:56:52 GMT
References: <25160@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA> <7700075@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: thaler@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Maurice Thaler)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 31
Distribution:USA

I am a confused person. I have a Dell SYSTEM 310 20Mhz 386 and a Seagate
4096 80Megabyte 28ms drive. I just bought an Adaptec ACB-2372 controller
and installed it and am getting less than spectacular results. It is
better than the original results with the Western Digital controller but
not up to the claims of Adaptec. With the WD controller I was getting
about 250K/sec data transfer. With the Adaptec I am getting about
450K/sec. This is much lower than the 700-750K advertised. I have
trouble believing that my bus is the culprit, but it could be. I had a
very long drawn out struggle trying to get the Perstor 16-bit controller
to work and never was able to get it to work. The latest version of the
ROM that they sent me formatted the 4096 fine, but the darn thing would
not boot properly. It would try to do a recalibration and then just
report that it was a non-bootable disk. I had many VERY long
converstations with Perstor and they ended up saying that they could get
it to work if I sent them my machine.... something I was not willing to
do. Several friends of mine have been trying this Adaptec card, which
was priced very reasonably, so I tried it. The problem is the data
transfer rate. I have stripped out several things from my CONFIG.SYS and
that helped some but still not enough. QEMM.SYS 4.1 from Quarterdeck 
slows things down by at least 100K/sec when I map RAM so I can use the
LOADHI program to move TSR's to High Memory. When I install EMCACHE, it
slows things down even worse. When I boot from a CLEAN floppy with
DOS3.3 I get my best rate at about 550K/sec  but that is still much
lower than 750 or 700.  
  My questions are: Is this the wrong hard disk for this card? If not,
any suggestions for speeding things up? What is the right, affordable
hard disk that does work with this card in the 70-80Megabyte range
(before RLL'ing)? I need a lot of space because I use my setup for doing
desktop publishing and just the fonts take up about 20Meg or so. I need
a lot of speed on the I/O which is why I am into the high data transfer
rate.