Perstor Disk Drive Controllers

[Paul Martin]

In article <868 at edstip.EDS.COM>, ohrnb at edstip.EDS.COM (Erik Ohrnberger) writes:
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with a Perstore disk controller
> cards?
> 

I am using a Perstor with a seagate 4096 80 meg and it works great!
This combination gives me approx 146 megs.  The card acts like an RLL
by putting 31 sectors per track as opposed to 17 with an MFM on a 
seagate 4096.  On a 20 mhz 386 I can only use a 3:1 interleave giving
me throughput of 360k a second.  A standard MFM on this machine uses a
2:1 interleave getting 260k a sec transfer rate (according to spinrite).
As you can see, the card is superior to a standard MFM or RLL controllers.
If you are going to use Xenix, be sure to get the 16FN perstor.  This
is an AT style hard/floppy controller for networks.  The only caution I
have is make sure that your case for the drive has good ventilation.
The perstor will cause your drive to get hotter than normal thus causing
a failure.  This is because the drive spins faster under the perstor.
I ran into this problem after having my drive fail.  I moved it to an
external case and it has work flawlessly ever since.  My mini tower case
has a poor design for allowing good circulation of cool air.  I also
have a full complement of boards and memory.  A friend of mine is
using 2 perstor controllers (1 in an AT and the other in a 386) with
2 seagate 4096 drives hanging off of each controller.  He has never
had a problem, and he bought his first perstor over 2 years ago.
Also be aware that the controller is not an MFM or an RLL so programs
like the new spinrite II don't like it.  This is the only package that
I know of that doesn't like the perstor.  You can even low level format
with disk manager when using a perstor.  I am running both Xenix/386
and dos 3.3 with no problems at all.

> 7-15 Mb/sec.  How does Perstor achieve 9 MB/sec?  and how reliable are

I guess you would need a 33mhz or faster machine to be able to use 1:1
interleave.  I for one have never seen a perstor do 9mb/sec.

I hope this helps!

-- 
+--------[ Paul Martin at P.S.M. Software Development ]--------+
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