WD-1007V-SE2

Bill Mayhew wtm at uhura.neoucom.EDU
Fri Jun 1 13:44:15 AEST 1990


The WD-1007V-SE2 controller, according to the documents I have is
really a 15 meg/sec controller.

I believe the key is that one must operate in the hard sectored
mode on the drive for the controller to function corretly.  The
trick is trying to figure out how to strap the drive in its hard
sectored configuration.  The documentation (if any) for many hard
drives is exceedingly fuzzy on the topic.  Apparetnly, not all
drives have the same number of sectors when they are in hard sector
mode!

I battled with a Siemens Megafile 300 and eventually gave up on
using the Megafile 300 becuase I couldn't seem to get it to go into
a hard sector mode by fiddling with jumpers on the drive.  I called
Siemens' computer products division in NJ, and they refused to talk
to me, saying that it was a VAR problem, not their problem.  I
tried to explain that their drive had been donated by a benfactor,
but they still said, "tough!".  The only thing I could get out of
them was that they thought a 1006 controller might be better, but
they refused stoically to tell me the jumper settings for their
drive.

On the other hand, WD tried to be very helpful.  I quickly got to a
person that was very familiar with the 1007 controller by punching
thought the 1-800 voicemail system.  The woman who answered stepped
through the setup procedure with me on the phone, and agreed that I
had everything set as correctly as could be, but alas, the Siemens
drive still refused to cooperate.

I put the Siemens back on the shelf and yanked a Priam drive out of
my IBM model-80.  I flipped the switch on the Praim to 36 sectors
to track, and it formatted perfectly with the 1007 controller in
about 20 minutes.

The Siemens drive had the symptom that one of the other net
practicioners described of seeming to work properly, but taking an
excruciatingly long time to format.  I believe this was the result
of being in soft sector mode such that the drive does not pass back
the expected address mark to the controller.

==Bill==
-- 

Bill Mayhew  Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Rootstown, OH  44272-9995  USA    216-325-2511
wtm at uhura.neoucom.edu   ....!uunet!aablue!neoucom!wtm



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