Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!mailrus!gumby!bowden
From: bowden@gumby.cc.wmich.edu (Michael L. Bowden)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: SCSI drive/controller
Keywords: SCSI drive controlloer
Message-ID: <823@gumby.cc.wmich.edu>
Date: 15 Aug 89 18:00:26 GMT
References: <1451@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Reply-To: bowden@gumby.cc.wmich.edu (Michael L. Bowden)
Organization: Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI
Lines: 19

I just bought one of these ST296N drives myself (HDI, right?), and have 
a little background information for you.

Apparently, these drives are used quite a bit in the Atari ST world.
The stories that I hear are that some of the drives will do 900K/sec,
others will only do about 450K/sec.  The people that are getting 900K/sec
have version 7 ROMs in their drives, the 450K/sec group have version 8 
ROMs.  What happened was that (supposedly) Seagate purposely slowed down 
the drive so that it would work with the Macintosh, thus crippling it for 
everyone else in the world.  It means that the best you can do is a 2:1 
interleave, unless you can come up with a v7 ROM somewhere.  If you do, let 
me know...I'd like to borrow it!

I ran CORETEST on mine when I got it, and (by accident) ended up interleaving
it at the Diskmanager default of 3, then re-ran it with 2.  If you want the
figures, I can mail them to you.  Anyway, I'm getting 450K/sec, so overall
it's about twice as fast as the old CMI 20meg I had before...not too shabby.
Still, it irks me that I can't squeeze that extra potential out of it.
By the way, I'm running a 12mhz 286 from Computer Products United.