From: belal@sco.COM (Bela Lubkin)
Newsgroups: biz.sco.general
Subject: Re: Results of testing dd
Date: 23 Dec 92 18:35:39 GMT
Organization: [resent by] The SCOGEN gateway and Propagation Society
Resent-From: mmdf@xenitec.on.ca
Submit-To: scogen@xenitec.on.ca
Cc: consult!bob@uunet.UU.NET
Precedence: bulk

Bob Willey wrote:

> NOTE:  Where do you get the above utility???? ^^^^^^^  SCSICNTL.EXE
>        I have looked on Adatpec's BBS, Seagate's, Quantum's, and ours
>        and did not find this utility.  Also checked several other BBS's
>        and could not locate it.

It is an Adaptec utility, written by Roy Neese, one of their engineers.
However, Adaptec does not support it and you won't find it on their BBS.
You can UUCP it from Roy's UNIX box.  Following is from my Systems file,
but do note that I haven't tried to connect to adaptex in over a year,
so this may no longer be the right phone number:

adaptex Any ACU 2400 18174886893 "" \d\d\d gin:-BREAK\d\d\d-gin:-BREAK\d\d\d-gin:-BREAK\d\d\d-gin: suucp

> >        OLD MACHINE                             NEW MACHINE
> > 386/33 w/8mb memory 64kcache           486/DX266 w/16mb memory 256k cache
> > Ultrastor 12F ESDI controller          Adaptec 1542 SCSI controller
> > Maxtor 338mb drive (~ 16ms)            HP 667 SCSI-2 drive (~13ms)
> > SCO Xenix 2.3.2                        SCO Xenix 2.3.4 GT

>                         -----Old System------  -----New System------
> DEVICE BLOCKSIZE COUNT  REALTIME USER  KERNEL  REALTIME USER  KERNEL
> ====== ========= =====  ======== ====  ======  ======== ====  ======
> rhd0a     2k     8192    25.4    0.2    5.0     1:06.2  0.0    3.1
> hd0a      2k     8192    38.3    0.5   15.1       59.0  0.2   27.0
> rhd0a    256k     64     25.6    0.0    3.8        N/A
> hd0a     256k     64     25.6    0.0   12.9        N/A
> rroot     2k     8192    26.8    0.3    5.0     1:06.1  0.0    3.7 
> root      2k     8192    34.4    0.5   15.6       58.8  0.1   27.5
> rroot    256k     64     25.9    0.0    3.8        N/A
> root     256k     64     25.9    0.0   13.0        N/A
> rhd00     2k     8192    25.4    0.5    4.7     1:07.1  0.0     4.1
> hd00      2k     8192    34.7    0.5   14.5       58.8  0.2    27.1
> rhd00    256k     64     25.7    0.0    3.7        N/A
> hd00     256k     64     27.0    0.0   13.1        N/A

> Note:  You will notice on the New System (SCO Xenix 2.3.4) the dd
> command gave us an error:  dd: argument 256K out of range
> Tried doing 64k and also 262144, but no luck.

Interesting.  Copy /bin/dd from your 2.3.2 system to the 2.3.4 system --
I just verified this, somehow the dd binary on 2.3.4 is an 8086 binary
that won't do large transfers, while the one on 2.3.2 is a 386 binary
that isn't limited.  This appears to be a product engineering bug in
2.3.4.

> Obviously something
> is still not setup correctly on the NEW SCSI-2 system with the
> Adaptec 1542B controller.  We really need to get our hands on the
> SCSICNTL.EXE program so we can see what is going on.
> Thanks for everyone's help and assistance.

Could be the drive.  Could also be that the Ultrastor 12F does track
caching better than the 1542B.  I predict that SCSICNTL will let you
turn on some on-drive caching in the HP SCSI drive which will make it
remarkably faster.

>Bela<