Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwvax!shorty!thaler
From: thaler@shorty.CS.WISC.EDU (Maurice Thaler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Dell 310 flame (of sorts)
Summary: whats with the bus?
Message-ID: <8634@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 2 Oct 89 02:18:41 GMT
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: thaler@shorty.cs.wisc.edu (Maurice Thaler)
Distribution: usa
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 61


I have been using a DELL 310 20Mhz 386 for about 13 months now. When I
first got it, I thought I was getting a real hot machine that would have
few limits. As I have used it for a while and tried to expand it, that
thought has soured. First off, I feel that Dell tech support is
generally "ok" but aimed at less experienced users and tries to act as a
filter when more exprerienced users try to get "higher level" info on
their systems. 
My case in point is the bus. I do desktop publishing and have needs for
lots of disk space, and as I have discovered good disk i/o. Through the
last 13 months I have experimented with different disk controllers
trying to get a good combination of disk speed and space. The Dell bus
and BIOS has been a real problem however. The PERSTOR 16 bit controller
did not work with it until about last December. I tried the Adaptec RLL
controller and discovered that although friends of mine with 12mhz AT's
were getting 700K/sec (coretest) throughput without a cache, I could not
manage better than about 550K.
Finally I bit the bullet and sprang for a BIG FAST ESDI drive, a
MINISCRIBE 9380E, 307 Meg (aproximately), 17ms ESDI. I also tried one of
the Compuadd Caching controllers. If you don't know about this, it looks
to be a really nifty controller, it will allow you to install 1-4 SIMMS,
either 256K or 1Meg (you can't mix sizes of course. Well the DELL would
not even BOOT with this controller, I could get it to boot if I ran
through the SETUP in ROM and then hit F10 to continue, but the data
transfer was not good, only about 750K with 256K of cache installed. I
saw this same card do double that throughput on a Mylex 20Mhz 386. When
I asked Dell about this and if they would support any other caching ESDI
controller, their only response was "we don't support anything besides
our original equipment. You can hang whatever you want off of it, but we
won't help you".  Well, I could run this new ESDI drive I have with a
Western Digital 1007a WAH (standard ESDI) card, but all I was getting,
was 566K/sec (650K with buffers set up higher), and this friend of mine
who builds clones in town was checking out DTC controllers from the QUME
company, so I tried that in my DELL. Well it seemed quite compatable,
great setup in the ROM of the controller, but the DELL just could not
handle 1:1 interleave with this sucker. I got 54K (thats right)/sec. I
set it to 1:2 interleave and got 495K/sec (gosh its fun doing low level
formats of 300+meg hard disks repeatedly :-) ).  I took this hard disk
and controller over to my friend's 20Mhz Mylex 386 and did the 1:1
interleave and saw 990K/sec without buffers!!     Well I called up Dell
again (they must just love me) and begged the tech support guy to please
explain why my computer performs so much worse that a clone worth less
than 1/2 the price. I asked about the bus speed. Is it really 8mhz like
they said or perhaps maybe it is running a little slow? They just stone
walled me. I got him to find the chip that controls the bus speed, the
82c301, but I seriously doubt that the situation can be improved. So, It
looks like I am going to sell my Dell, and switch to some cheap clone
with twice the performance. Since I am a consultant for desktop
publishing, I will be forced to recommend to my clients that they should
not buy Dell if they are interested it high-performance i/o.  In my
opinion, once you get up to about 20mhz with 386's, if you don't have
disk access to match, it is just a waste of juice, unless you are just
doing spreadsheets all day long. If you are doing database or desktop
publishing applications, the i/o is CRITICAL.
 
Any opinions on this. Am I being unfair to DELL. Is there something
obvious I am not doing?  Oh, by the way, when I did my hard disk tests,
I pulled ALL my cards out of my machine except the Paradise VGA-Pro.

Maurice Thaler   SYSOP  Audio Projects BBS (608) 836-9473
                 SYSOP  Power Board    BBS (608) 222-8842