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