Mike Chambers
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2006
- Messages
- 2,641
i don't know whether or not most of you guys pay attention to interleave values when low-level formatting your old MFM/RLL hard drives, but for those that don't, or don't know what it is, i want to stress it's importance as i was reminded myself here tonight.
i got a new 5160 delivered to me today, and the hard drive works fine - a 30 MB seagate RLL half-height. the first thing i did was load spinrite II and run a drive analysis. it was formatted with the default interleave of 3:1, and it was measured to transfer data at a rate of 28 KB/s.
it tested the transfer speeds using all possible interleave values, and it turned out that using an interleave of 4:1, it was able to pull off - get this....
199 KB/s
yes, that's right 199 KB/s raw hard disk transfer rate on a 4.77 MHz XT box. needless to say, i decided to just wipe the drive then. i didn't need the last owner's stuff. did a full LLF using the 4:1 interleave, installed MS-DOS 5.0 and wow! this thing is rocking!
i suggest all of you go run spinrite II on your old boxen with similar drives and pay attention to the interleave test results. you might just be amazed at how much faster you can get your drive going. i did the same thing on another old 20 MB MFM drive (an Everex) and while it wasn't quite as drastic, i was able to kick it up to 90 KB/s from 27 KB/s.
just think of this as a public service announcement.
i got a new 5160 delivered to me today, and the hard drive works fine - a 30 MB seagate RLL half-height. the first thing i did was load spinrite II and run a drive analysis. it was formatted with the default interleave of 3:1, and it was measured to transfer data at a rate of 28 KB/s.
it tested the transfer speeds using all possible interleave values, and it turned out that using an interleave of 4:1, it was able to pull off - get this....
199 KB/s
yes, that's right 199 KB/s raw hard disk transfer rate on a 4.77 MHz XT box. needless to say, i decided to just wipe the drive then. i didn't need the last owner's stuff. did a full LLF using the 4:1 interleave, installed MS-DOS 5.0 and wow! this thing is rocking!
i suggest all of you go run spinrite II on your old boxen with similar drives and pay attention to the interleave test results. you might just be amazed at how much faster you can get your drive going. i did the same thing on another old 20 MB MFM drive (an Everex) and while it wasn't quite as drastic, i was able to kick it up to 90 KB/s from 27 KB/s.
just think of this as a public service announcement.