AUX and hard drives

[Alexis Rosen]

marcelo at deadzone.uucp (Marcelo Gallardo) writes:
>	On a slightly different note, how many people use SyQuest
>	cartridges with A/UX. I've been using mine for a while now and
>	have noticed a few problems. First, it doesn't like having "big"
>	programs compiled on it. Tried compiling "rn" on it once, and I
>	received a "PANIC: while freeing inode" crash. Happened on a few
>	other programs of that size as well.
>
>	It also seems to constantly have read problems like the
>	following...
>
>	Disk read c4d0s3 Error: Recovered error, code = 0x17
>	Logical block 34064, physical blocks 34160-34167
>	[etc.]

This doesn't surprise me at all. The Syquests have decent seek performance,
but their transfer speed is abominable. I think they're even worse than the
small 20MB Seagates that were so popular a year or two ago. And I'm not sure
about this, but I think that they rotate slower than regular disks. If so,
that doesn't help transfers, and increases latency (which makes seeking slower
than you'd expect from the avg. access numbers they quote).

What this all means is that the Syquests are barely acceptable to the A/UX
disk device driver. They're on the fuzzy lower boundary of the performance
envelope.

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
alexis at panix.com
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis