MAXTOR XT4170 with WD1007 Controller (& SpeedStore)

[Randall L. Smith]

In article <1187 at otc.otca.oz>, ronb at otc.otca.oz (Ron Barrett) writes:
> Is anyone using a WD1007 with a MAXTOR XT4170 hard disk? Im using it
> in an AST 386 running XENIX 2.3.1.

I have this exact configuration except System V on an Intel 386.  It
works fine.  Actually excellent, and has done so since last January. 

> The basic problem is that the system locks up whilst accessing the
> harddisk.  Apparently the WD ESDI controller doesn't work all that
> well with a hard disk with more than 1024 cyclinders. 

Well, thats totally inaccurate.  The WD-1007 ESDI supports *much* larger
drives than the puny 180MB, 14ms Maxtor.  I don't know how long you've
had this configuration or if it has been up more than a few minutes.  I
suspect the latter and think you tried to out-think the controller.  In
my first run-in, I did. 

With the WD-1007 too much knowledge is dangerous.  You want to let the
controller BIOS do the configuration and the formatting.  The easiest
way I found was to boot Dos from a flop and use debug.  With debug you;

debug
- G=C800:5

and you will be in touch with the (menu driven) gods of the controller.
I presume you've already been there.

Apparently you pumped the actual heads, cylinders and sectors/track in
the configuration.  This is death.  The way the WD-1007 family works is
they compute the offset into extended ranges of the disk.  I do not
understand is how do all the blocks then appear with chkdsk or df -t?

Anyway, just take the default conflaguration which will appear strange
and totally wrong.  As I recall, there are three choices.  One is for
17 sectors/track (spt), 34 spt and 63 spt.  The head count will be many
times more than true and the spt and cylinders way off.  Thats good. 

Somehow by multiplying them together you get the actual surface area
equivalence for the drive.  For a drive with more than 1024 cylinders
(as is XT4170E) use the selection with 63 sectors/track. 

The real bummer is you have to *manually* enter all the defect list.
Grrrr.  WD says they will fix this eventually.  It's really unthinkable
they didn't provide that from day one.  Oh well.

> The dealer told me about a program called SpeedStore from Storage
> Dimension that is supposed to fix the problem?

*Dos dealer flame ON*

This is typical of most PC dealers.  They know hardware (sort of) and
Dos.  The product they recommended to you runs under Dos and has
drivers for Dos to access the extended range that only Dos can't reach. 
There will be a *mint* to be made in Unix support because these dealers
are too stoopid (intentional spelling) to get any Unix experience. 
Even rudimentary knowledge that Dos crap don't run under Unix.  Duh.

*Dos dealer flame OFF*

Maybe I had too much coffee today.:-}  Well, hope this helps, Ron and
anyone else suffering this problem as I've seen a number of very astute
individuals making this apparently common mistake.   Right, Bill? :-)

Cheers!

- randy

Usenet: randy at rls.uucp
Bangpath: ...<backbone>!osu-cis!rls!randy
Internet: rls!randy at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu