Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!decvax!mandrill!neoucom!wtm From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: FAST disks on PC AT clones Message-ID: <1162@neoucom.UUCP> Date: 10 May 88 18:13:53 GMT References: <21346@amdcad.AMD.COM> <205@octopus.UUCP> <1006@spdcc.COM> <1721@m2-net.UUCP> Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine Lines: 34 Summary: Priam, CDC Wren III are good drives At the moment, I have a Priam 330 MB drive on the IBM model 80 I am using. The Priam is a full height drive, with about 28 mS access time according to CORETEST. It draws about 2.2 amps while it is running, so it isn't for faint-of-heart power supplies. It plugged right into the indigenous ESDI controller in the mod 80, and shows a transfer rate around 768 Kbytes/sec (without IBMCACHE running). Priam's documentation is very good, and the included setup disk did everything automatically for setting up the drive. The only thing you have to do is to make a backup copy of the installation disk and then SYS DOS onto it, boot up and it does its thing. There must be one heck of a mondo positioner in the Priam drive, as the whole mod 80 shakes visibly when the disk drive is doing some heavy duty seeking. By the way, the mod 80 is the "old" 16 MHz version with IBM's own ESDI card, which of course is made by Adaptec. I had been using a CORE International drive AKA CDC Wren III in the model 80 before. The core drive was very quiet in operation, and showed about the same performance figures as the Priam drive. Kind of makes me wonder if the controller isn't the limiting factor here. The CORE drive really is a nicely put together device. The construction quality looks much nicer than any other drives I've looked at, except for some Toshiba 8" SMD/E drives (but those don't count!). I'd say that if I wanted a pretty large (~120 MB) fast, rugged disk drive, the CORE is the way to go... but of course, you get wahat you pay for. CORE isn't the cheapest game in town. I don't have personal experience with the OMTI ESDI controllers, but I have used the 5527 ST-506/412 RLL controller, and have been impressed with the performance. OMTI's controllers from visual inspection seem to be more durably constructed than Adaptec's. --Bill