Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!umich!samsung!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: 386 Unix - Minimum HD
Keywords: Hard Disk, Controller, ESDI, Unix, 386, RLL
Message-ID: <1997@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 10 Jan 90 19:11:51 GMT
References: <1781@clyde.concordia.ca>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 29

In article <1781@clyde.concordia.ca> victor@sherlock.CS.Concordia.CA (Victor Krawczuk) writes:

|      For people on a budget (like myself) who can only afford an RLL
| and/or IDE type of HD, is the bottleneck effect caused by this type
| of drive:
|                     a) unnoticeable
|                     b) a minor inconvenience (offset by $$$ savings)
|                     c) irritating but one can live with it under certain
|                        conditions
|                     d) a pain in the butt
|                     e) enough to take it out on the kids????

  I have ESDI at work and RLL at home. When I had the Adaptek controller
the performance of the RLL was not very good. By using caching in the
kernel I could get by this, but then the system CPU time went up. Now I
have the WD1006VSR2 at home, with hardware track buffering. Uses no CPU
and is as fast (by all measurements I've made) as the ESDI.

  I am planning to go ESDI at home if I can determine that the Compuadd
cached controller works well with Xenix. I am about at the limit of the
cheap disks (ST4096's) and I am not able to add disk until I switch to
something with higher density. I *think* I will run a 760MB drive and
leave room for the future, but I might use a pair of 330s for
performance and reliability and let the future take care of itself.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon