Risc System/6000

[Edward Vielmetti]

[ disk options on the RS/6000

aha, it's an esdi drive that's built in.  I wondered.

23ms, 1.3MB/sec transfer is wimpy for a fast machine.
In this configuration the machine is going to be seriously
i/o bound, without a doubt.

12.5ms, 2MB/sec transfer on the 320MB disk is better,
but that's not top of the line these days -- not for
SCSI (sync will go faster) and certainly not for disk
in general.  I don't see a real fast disk for these things.

Can we get a real word on the scsi adapter -- i.e.

- is it a part that's being sold now for the microchannel,
  or a new thing ?
- is it SCSI-1 or SCSI-2, does it support synchronous operation,
  etc.
- are there any problems with dropping in a microchannel SCSI
  adapter except perhaps that of getting device driver support?

The SCSI adapter I saw had an 80C186 and a big IBM chip (must
be some ASIC thing) on it, the copyright on the 80C186 was
1979 -- hardly state of the art in chips !

--Ed