Josh Dersch wrote:
I have a number of RQDX3's, but I'll probably
go with the Emulex QD21
ESDI controller that I have. It has an auto-boot option, which will
be useful since the 11/23 board I have just has the ODT ROMs...
Jerome Fine replies:
I use a Sigma RQD11-EC quad ESDI controller which can run 4 ESDI drives.
What I like best is that 3 drives are VERY easily (just ground the
correct line)
made WRITE PROTECTED. Not having a proper panel, I just use a 10 pin
cable and alligator clips to ground the line.
The Hitachi DK515 with about 600 MBytes each work well. I modified the
RT-11 MSCP device driver to allow me to boot any of the 60 partitions on the
3 drives. Normally, I use 3 drives with 2 being backups and only drive
0 with
20 RT-11 partitions being modified at any time. All drives are usually
WRITE
PROTECTED most of the time since I normally fix bugs in the RT-11 operating
system and the device drivers. Since any mistakes in my code modifications
could corrupt the hard drive, having them hardware WRITE PROTECTED
prevents that until I have checked out the code. After I have made the
changes
to the backup drives, I boot the backup drive and copy the changes to
drive 0
which is now just a data drive.
I have 2 command files which compare all 20 partitions on drive 0 to each of
the 20 partitions on drive 1 or drive 2. That takes about 4 minutes for
each
pair of RT-11 partitions of 32 MBytes each or about 80 minutes in total.
Under Ersatz-11 with a core 2 duo, it takes about 1.7 seconds per pair of
RT-11 partitions of 32 MBytes or about 30 seconds for all 20 pair of RT-11
partitions - not even time to get a drink. I am working on enhancing
the HD:
device driver under Ersatz-11. It is twice as fast as the MSCP device
driver.
For raw throughput, if I bypass the HD: device driver code and use a user
subroutine without interrupts (hardly necessary when things are this fast),
making a copy of an RT-11 partition of 32 MBytes is twice as fast again.
A straight copy is about 0.2 seconds for all 32 MBytes as opposed to
about 240 seconds the copy an RT-11 partition on those very fast (for
a real DEC PDP-11/83 system) ESDI hard drives.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine