anybody heard of OMTI?

[James Van Artsdalen]

In <775 at drexel.UUCP>, ipc at drexel.UUCP (Image Processing Center) wrote:

> OMTI has discontinued the card due to lack of demand.

It also wasn't a very good design.  Couldn't work under anything but
DOS without a special driver.  Didn't have a full-track buffer (it had
about half a track of buffer - presumably that was enough to prevent
overflow).  Took up 1K of the lower 640K memory.  I have one for sale
real cheap.

> SCO, like any other OS, doesn't know about the interleave factor
> of a track buffering controller. Track buffering controllers exist
> with the standard AT compatible interface.

Yes, but keep in mind that there was a bug in the SCO driver at one
point (may even be there now for all I know) that kept it from really
working right with the WD1007.  The symptom was abysmally low
throughput, and the cause was the SCO driver sending "set drive
parameter" commands to the controller every sector - dumping the
buffer and causing the track to be re-read for each sector.

> Therefore, you > don't have a problem unless the WD1007 doesn't have
a track buffer.

For the record, it definitely does.  Its best feature is the drive
remapping: it can make a 17 sec/trk drive with more than 1024 tracks
appear to be a 34 sec/trk drive with half as many tracks, and the
software (DOS, unix, OS/2) can't tell the difference.  The only real
problems are a truly terrible formatter and the fact that it can't
handle the 15Mbit/sec drives yet (the 600meg Maxtor comes to mind).
-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen      james at bigtex.cactus.org      "Live Free or Die"
Home: 512-346-2444 Work: 338-8789       9505 Arboretum Blvd Austin TX 78759