On 23 Jul 98 at 18:08, Cory Marshall wrote:

> Durring some writes my hard drive slows down and a wobbling sound
> is heard (I.E. non thrashing but a constant moving sound) this
> happens mostly durrening downloads where the CPS goes from a normal
> 1630+ to 1000->900 because of the extremly long write delays.  The
> delays do not seem to happen on reads.  I run scandisk & diskopt at
> least twice a week.

  When a file is being written, the FAT should be updated every time
a new cluster is added to the file.  The head travel between data
tracks and FAT can be reduced on reads by caching the FAT entries,
but this really can't be done on writes.  That could be a factor.

  Drives of this vintage typically used an "interleave factor" to try
to make sure that when the drive finished sending one sector to RAM,
the heads were just coming up on the next sector in logical (rather
than physical) order.  If this factor is set incorrectly for your
actual system/drive performance, it can often require almost an
entire rotation of the platters from one sector to the next.  This
could result from wear, friction, speed that needs to be adjusted
back to specs [the machine IS 10 years old...].  On some machines, a
low-level format will determine the correct value for this drive in
this machine, but I don't know if you'd want to go to that much
trouble.

David G



  I wouldn't normally quote the stuff below, but when the original
reached me, some of the characters (notably '=' and '1/2') had been
MIME-encoded somewhere along the way, and other readers might have
found that confusing:

> PCBUILD guidlines said provide as much info as possible so.
>
> Hardware:
> BRAND       : KLH 286 Champion
> PROCESSOR   : AMD N80L286-12/S (H 1223EMY) (12Mhz, Throughput 18.99Mhz)
> COPROCESSOR : None
> MEMORY      : 1MB, 4xSIMM DRAM, 256k each, 100ns, 3 chips (2 mem, 1 contr.)
> BIOS        : Phoenix V3.10 (01/15/88)
> VIDEO BIOS  : OAK TECHNOLOGY VGA BIOS
> MISC.       : 101 Key Enhanced          (IRQ 1)
>               Sound Blaster V2.5        (A220 D1 I5 T3)
>               Microsoft 3 Button        (COM1, IRQ4, Addr. 3F8)
>               14.4 fax Modem Int.       (COM2, IRQ3, Addr. 2F8, 16550A)
>               Epson Action 3251 Printer (LPT1: A378, IRQ?)
> FLOPPY      : Floppy Disk 1: 1.44 MB 3.5" (Teac FD-235HF)
> HARD DRIVE  : Split into 2 parts (C: 36.91MB, D: 3.73MB)
>               Tracks 820, Heads 6, Sectors  17, Size 40.84MB
>               Controller ST351A/X V3.02.02
>               Buffer 8KB, Dual Ported, Multi Sector, Buffer read ahead
>               ECC-Bytes 4
> IRQ         : 0=System Timer, 1=Keyboard, 2=Unknown, 3=COM2, 4=COM1 (Mouse)
>               5=Soundblaster V2.5 (8 bit), 6=Unknown, 7->15=Open
>
> Software:
>     MS-DOS 6.22 (Rev. A), Windows 3.1, 2M V3.0, PKzip 2.03, games & tools
>     first basic v1.0, A86, mis. games, etc.
>
>     DOS settings
>     Buffers=45,1 (DOS)  99,8 (WIN3.1)
>     stacks=0,0
>     files=30